"Hello, I'm a Mac."
"And I'm a PC."
...and one of you is shite.  
  Well, no, not really, but that's how it's always pitched, and so after many long and heated conversations around this subject, it's finally time to put the record straight in time-honoured fashion.
  By having a good rant about it.
  You may remember the dialogue above from the Apple advert featuring Mitchell and Webb a few years ago, which was designed to point out how easy and user-friendly a fast, sexy Mac is compared to a boring, clunky old PC. In theory, I have no problem with that line of thinking at all. As far as I'm concerned, a Mac is an absolute doddle to get your head around; it's intuitive, has a straight-forward interface and can be operated by people with very little computer knowledge.  
  Sadly, in many cases, that's exactly the kind of people who buy them and it lulls some of them into a false sense of superiority.  
  I don't know what it is about a certain section of the Apple fraternity, but there are a significant number of Mac fans who think that because their shiny new machine works straight out of the box and is easy to use it somehow makes it better than a PC. They'll often champion their choice of consumer product at great length, too, which drives me up the wall because it's a disingenuous way of thinking.
  Just because your iProduct is more expensive doesn't make it better.  
  By far the loudest argument from these devotees is that their machine is safe, totally  attack-proof and that all this antivirus checking and stuff is a pain. Sorry, but a good firewall and a couple of utility packages take minutes to install and will then be all you need to ensure you never have a problem (and by 'good', I don't mean Norton, McAfee or any of the other expensive crap bloatware that clutters up your hard-drive and slows your system down. Use this, this and this. They're all free and haven't let me down yet.) 
  In reality though, so long as you stay away from dubious Russian porn sites (I know, I know - restrain yourself, for God's sake!), you'll probably never be targeted at all. If you do, just run this. Five minutes of maintenance a month. Hardly a hassle, is it?  
  Ok, so back to the argument. Why do the Apple crowd think their machines are so much better? Well, let's take the ones that are designed to attract the home PC crowd. Here they are. Lovely, eh? Except, look at those specs. Tellingly, unlike the machines from a few years ago, these new Macs are now using both Intel chips (I have a clocked Intel i5 in my current rig) and ATI Radeon graphics cards - pretty much the same components that any semi-decent PC would sport. Most of my Mac mates also run Windows 7 alongside OS X, so for all their PC bashing, Apple-ites seem to have no problem at all with sharing the parts. Either that or they're so computer illiterate they don't realise what's in the box.  
  In earlier years, Mac fans would point out that PC and Mac performance couldn't be compared because they were designed around different architecture, and at the time they were right. However, it's all the same components now and what can't be argued against is the fact that you could buy a bespoke PC that would annihilate the top machine here on every front for half the price. It won't look as pretty, sure, and the gubbins will be in a separate box as opposed to an 'all-in-one' unit, but at least you won't be left feeling like you've spent a grand and a half for eight hundred quid's worth of laptop components in a pretty case.    
  Now I'm not knocking Macs, really I'm not, but what does get my goat is the erroneous belief of the militant wing of the Mac brigade that just because their metal guru looks great and is sleek and expensive, it's the best thing on the market. These are the kind of people who queue up at midnight in Regent Street for the latest iPhone six months after they queued up at midnight for the previous model. Sorry, but I don't buy into that kind of shallow consumer mentality, which is probably why I'd rather have a plain black £5 Primark t-shirt than pay £40 for a designer one.  
  Look, I'll nail my colours to the mast here; I'm a hardcore PC gamer. I built my current machine myself and tailored it to what I wanted - a blisteringly fast solid-state gaming rig with boat-loads of memory and storage. These Macs won't do gaming very well. They might use ATI Radeon cards - so do I - but comparing the actual units used here is like comparing a Toyota Yaris with a Lexus LFA. Technically the same thing from the same factory, but performance wise, nowhere near.
  To be fair, a lot of Mac users will say they have no interest in gaming and that it's graphic design they're into, but although there's nothing wrong with the screen on these things, when you compare it against a decent standalone monitor you can see a difference. And there's no way of upgrading to a better monitor when your entire computer is bolted on behind it, is there?  
  In reality though, comparing Macs and PCs should be, and is, pretty pointless as they're clearly aimed at two totally different people. A Mac is for someone who just wants a computer that turns on, does everything that is required to a reasonable standard and looks good. PCs are for people who want to fiddle around, get a set-up that's exactly right for them and then do whatever they need to do as well as it can be done.  
  A Mac is your Mum. She decides what's best for you and she'll serve it up with no fuss. Get it down you and don't argue! A PC is your big brother. He won't tell you how to do anything or give you any help, but if you can be bothered to learn a few tricks, you can get him to jump every time.
  And run rings round your Mum.   
  So the bottom line is this: just how much is 'shiny' worth to you? Me? Not a lot. If I can get something that does the same job better for alf the price, then I'm going to say tits to badges every time...

I briefly covered this in the Diary but I'm still ticking, so I've expanded it into a full Rant. Credit goes to Prospect Union for the facts and figures used...
Apologies for the length...

  For the first time in my working life this week, I went on strike. It was not a decision I took lightly because, as a Public Sector worker, I know that my job is a lot less vulnerable to the vagaries of market forces than people in the Private Sector. At least it used to be. This coalition Government has changed all that thanks to the way they tore up my terms and conditions of employment earlier this year.
  We keep being told that there is no money left in the coffers to pay out all these 'gold-plated' Public Sector pensions (more on this later) so I will have to work until I'm 67 or 68, pay a significantly increased amount into the system over the next four years and get a lot less out at the end of it (assuming I live that long).
  This is wrong on a number of levels, but it's the 'no money' bit that really bites me.
  I've said before, that the phrase 'Government money' is a misnomer. There's no such thing. Governments in and of themselves don't have any money. It's our money, yours and mine, taken from us under threat of prosecution at point of source. 40% of my so-called salary never leaves the Treasury coffers and it's the same to a lesser or greater degree for everyone in the Public Sector.
  For every other worker, the tax man will help himself to 25%, 40% or even 50% of your hard-earned and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. All this wedge then goes into a great big pot and the Government of the day decides what important things to spend it on. The things we all vote them into power to address, naturally.
  Things like bailing-out a bunch of privately owned banks that were so profligate with lending their own money out to bad risks that they would have gone under without a huge injection of your cash.
  Things like doling out billions hand over fist to Europe (another £65 billion this year) to keep the whole ridiculous Ponzi scheme going a little longer (and it will collapse eventually, make no mistake about that.)
  Things like fighting a number of pointless, unwinnable foreign conflicts for reasons that now escape even the most blatant apologist.
  Yes, I clearly remember these were the things that one third of the British public voted for when two thirds of us turned out to choose our new dictators in 2010, but then, the ones before them were doing exactly the same.
  I should also add at this point that every man, woman and child in the UK is paying £440 a year for the privilege of E.U. membership. We all want that, right? We must do, because when Parliament discussed a proposal to have a debate leaving Europe, a three-line whip came into effect to shout it down, and that would only happen if constituents instructed their MP to do so. So we all must want, desperately, to integrate ever more closely with Europe. Well, six-hundred and fifty of us do at any rate
  And yet that's exactly what Cameron will be discussing with the other heads of the European Union in the run up to Christmas. He's keen to address how to bring us all closer together and avoid the threat of the UK drifting back into recession (drifting back?) next year. Expect the bail-out tin to be rattled ever more loudly as we roll into 2012 - especially with an Olympics to pay for!
  So that's why I withdrew my labour last Wednesday and lost a days pay (hey, they can put my money towards the next bung for India's space programme - I'm not proud). Not because I'm a militant Trot, but because we are all being fleeced and lied to on a daily basis by these clowns. We're so used to this tripe, and they're so used to coming out with it, that we're pretty much at the point now where we roll over and allow ourselves to be shafted.
  Sorry, but count me out.
  Yes, the country is skint, but only because the people we've voted to be our lords and masters are giving it away on the things that are meaningful to them and their cronies, not on what we, the British public - their fucking employers - see as important.
  Now onto my 'gold-plated' pension.
  I'm a professional. A foreman in a front-line operational service. The sad fact is that the majority of professional staff in my unit won't ever get a full 'gold plated' pension because they've had to spend years at college or university to gain the qualifications needed to do their job, so by the time they actually get the job they've trained so hard for they are unable work the required number of years pensionable service.
  Female professionals in particular can lose years if they have a child, and are often lucky to get two decades of reckonable service should they have more than one. Does that make their reduced pension 'silver plated'? Who knows? Yet when the tabloids quote Public Sector pension figures, apart from making me very angry, they will almost always cite Town Hall bosses and Head Teachers, as if every single one of us is on that sort of money.
  The lowest paid office worker in our unit (a trainee) is on £16,519. He then gets a couple of grand in London Weighting on top (for the time being; that's the next thing they want rid of).
  A middle ranking Professional Manager (the grade above mine) at the top of his pay-scale on £50,658 (and trust me, after twenty-two years, I'm still nowhere fucking near that), gets a pension of £21,900 a year and a lump sum of £65,600, after forty years service
  So basically, this 'gold plated' pension of ours equates to just about £5000 a year more than our most junior employee starting work in year one in a Central London unit - and that's before tax and based on our current pension system. The ones our MPs now want to shred.
  Now I readily agree that the Private Sector pay appalling pensions. This is because private companies tend to concentrate on rewarding their executives and shareholders in bonuses and dividends. They then cynically rely on the public purse to cater for the majority of their impoverished workforce when they retire on a pittance. Conveniently for Big Business, we have a Welfare State to absolve them of their corporate responsibility. In olden days, the private sector would simply allow their poor ex-employees to die.
  This Welfare State we all pay into is therefore subsidising the lack of pension provision of the FTSE 100 companies (whose collective directors paid themselves an average 49% extra in salary and bonuses this year alone) to avoid the low paid private sector workers starving. Billions of pounds of taxpayer's money then has to be spent in benefits on supporting these people to compensate for the Private Sector's collective neglect.
  What is apparent to me is that six hundred and fifty MPs want everyone but themselves and their high-flying cronies to be equally poor, yet they themselves have no qualms whatsoever about picking up their take-home basic salary of £69,000 as well as claiming free travel, subsidised housing,  subsidised food and anything up to five times their basic in 'expenses'.
  Now that's 'gold plated'!
  So next time you hear how all of us Public Sector workers are living the life of Riley and retiring to our villas in the South of France with pots full of your money, stop and have a think. There's a reason such disingenuous headlines are regularly trotted out. They're designed to deflect public anger away from where it should really be targeted.
  Divide and conquer, bread and circuses. They've served the ruling elite well for over two thousand years now and we're all still falling for it. Sadly, it seems like everyone is still more than happy to be somebody else's puppet.
  Some of us can see the strings, though. And where to swing the knife.

Within the vast organisation where I work there are myriad departments offering many wide and differing services. Naturally, this offers scope for all sorts of pointless and petty inter-departmental bureaucracy. Fortunately, we're all professionals and at the end of the day, everyone is part of the same company and we can all be relied upon to pull together and get the job done.
  Actually, no, I'm lying. Check out this latest bit of corporate absurdity:
  Now although I've never specified on this site whom I work for, nor what it is I do, regular readers will have surmised that I'm involved in the forensic field. You may also have gathered that I have a remit to deliver training once in a while around this sort of thing.
  So without getting too in depth, it came to pass this week that I was asked to look into the best way of physically recording marks in blood, and could I mock up some real footprints or fingermarks on a couple of floor tiles for people to practice on?
  Well, obviously this was a straightforward request given that we have a huge training complex at another site who specialise in exactly this sort of thing, so I gave them a bell...

"Hello there, I need to create some blood marks for a training exercise."
"Right. Well, you'll need some sterile horse blood then."
"Great, do you have any?"
"Oh yes, we've got gallons of it up here!"
"Fabulous, can I nick a bit? I just need to mock up one footprint."
"No, sorry. This is Central Training blood, you're a Local Training unit."
"C'mon, all I need is a thimble-full!"
"Absolutely not. I can tell you where we order ours from, though."
"I don't want to order a gallon, I just want to create one bloody mark!"
"Can't help you, mate."  

  I thought long and hard about this. Did I order a gallon and throw 99.9% away? No, the requisition paper trail alone would take a fortnight and I want to run the training next week. Did I trawl the local butchers for some pig's blood and keep it on site? Do-able, but we only have one fridge here and it's got our lunches in it.
  Fortunately, common sense prevailed and I realised I was looking at the problem all wrong. I mean, trying to come up with a logical solution like that, what was I thinking?
  So I stabbed myself in the fucking hand, wiped it all over my own bare foot, then stood on one tile and slapped the other...
  Job done.

It's my birthday this week. I'll be forty-three years of age. God almighty.
  It's funny, but I remember reading '2000AD' comic as a kid in the early Eighties and thinking that the year 2000 was absolutely ages in the future and that I'd be thirty-two when it arrived! That was so far away it might as well have been the moon for my thirteen year old head to grasp.
  Well, it wasn't. It came and went in a fucking blur. Now, nearly twelve years later, I'm hard pushed to even remember much of the intervening years. How the hell did that happen?
  I can recall being eighteen. I can see myself now, standing there at Photographic College, all denim and mullet, coming out with all sorts of bollocks about how this was who I was and how I would never change. Wrapping myself in a blanket of angst and faux-rebellion, drinking Strongbow and listening to too much Marillion. I look back at photos of that kid and can't recognise him for the life of me. Happily, this is a source of much relief.
  He's not all that different, though (apart from all that hair). He spent a lot of time in his own head and I still do now. The only difference is that, for the most part, the furniture up there is arranged better these days. My twenties were, well, my twenties. I had some fun times and some not-so-fun times. Made some memories and broke some hearts. The rites of passage that everyone goes through. By the time I hit thirty, I was convinced I had been finely tempered in the fires of worldly experience; that this was the fully-rounded person I was destined to be. The final product. What a crock.
  Fact is, at thirty I was still as full of shit as I was at eighteen, only the goalposts had moved. I was all 'Oh, the things these eyes have seen', which can make you seem windswept and interesting to a receptive younger audience (and that was fun for a while), but the hands of the clock are still turning and from thirty to forty seems to take ten fucking minutes. A recent addition to my circle of friends told me that I analyse things too much and that I'm too melodramatic. Fair play and well spotted, doll. I'd have railed against such comments a few years ago even though I've done exactly that since childhood, but she's right of course and it's no more than I've heard at various stages of my life (and almost exclusively from women.) The sooner she adds 'intense', 'moody' and 'bastard' to her checklist, the sooner we can fall out properly and move on with our lives.
  Women. No, we'll leave that subject for another time.
  I think being a father has changed me. The joy of having a little girl hurl herself around your legs as you come through the door at the end of a long day has replaced going for a few beers after work. Some of you reading this will see that as sad or embarrassing. That's your prerogative and good luck to you, but 'Billy the Fish'; the name I was given at the age of twenty for drinking like one lives on in name only now. To tell the truth, I couldn't go back to that life. To tell it even more, I wouldn't even want to. Like the song says, 'you gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em.' Me, I'm out, and I don't miss it one jot. There are still the odd nights of carousing with good friends in disreputable places, but these are well planned in advance now and all the more enjoyable for it. I can't see the days of 'coming to', lurching through some unknown part of London at four in the morning and wondering how the hell I got there (or where 'there' even is) making a comeback anytime soon.
  So now here I am, heading into middle-age. Older, yes, but wiser? Probably not. Is this the final product? No. Now I realise there ain't no such thing. All we ever are is a work in progress...
  At thirty I used to kid myself that I no longer cared what anyone thought of me. Now, at forty-three, I know at least that I mean that now, but that's about as definite as it gets. I also realise that the impression of a jaded cynic I was giving off for most of my thirties was a pale imitation of what it feels like to be the real thing.
  Then again, my fifty-year-old self will probably look back at me and scoff that I'm a wide-eyed dreamer who knows nothing. Let him, the miserable old bastard...
  Meanwhile, Happy Birthday to me.

I'm something of a connoisseur of the old London omnibus, seeing as I'm generally riding four of the fuckers for three and a quarter hours every day. You car drivers really have no idea of the rich and complex microcosm you're missing out on here. Allow me to illustrate...
  There's a certain camaraderie involved when one regularly catches the same bus at the same time each day. You get to 'meet' the same people.
  Me, I catch the Number 133 to London Bridge at 05:42 on Streatham High Road every morning and the shelter always fills up with the same four people (amongst sundry others). I don't know them, I would never dare to approach them (read on and you'll appreciate why), but we make eye contact and nod to each other so I've given them names for my own amusement because, in the cold and dark of a morning, it's a comfort to know that a familiar face is there. So much so that, whenever one of them is missing, I tend to almost worry. Almost.
  The first of our crowd to hit the shelter each morning is always Captain Lungs. The Captain is in his late Fifties (if I'm any judge) and a dyed-in-the-wool smoker. He's always puffing on one as he crosses the road on his way to our bus-stop and he'll carry on puffing until the bus arrives, whereupon he will deck his fag, get on the bus and start coughing explosively. Captain Lung's coughing is a show-stopper, so much so that many unwary travellers (and two bus drivers) have actually stopped the bus and tried to offer assistance to the poor, unfortunate man until he assured them of his fortitude and insisted they carry on. The Captain gets off at London Bridge and is apparently some sort of security guard. God help anyone causing mischief in his place of employment - he might cough on them.
  Less than a minute after him Sugarplum arrives at the stop. Sugarplum is either a really apathetic cross-dresser or the world's most bone-idle transsexual. (S)he is six foot two, eighteen stone and sports an unconvincing blonde wig. Think 'me doing Jimmy Savile' only less feminine. Sugarplum buys a new bag every week (it was a 'Hello Kitty' affair this morning) to accentuate her girly side and loves her boots.  Despite having hands like hams and a five o'clock shadow to rival Desperate Dan (well, it is five o' clock, I suppose), Sugarplum is quietly spoken and very unassuming. Bless.
  Arriving together a minute or so after Sugarplum (though from separate ends of Streatham High Road) come the two brickies, Ernie and Bert. I know they're brickies, as they both dress like shit and have those three-foot-long spirit levels poking out of their holdalls. Bert is the taller of the two with an amazing monobrow (a la Bert from 'Sesame Street') and Ernie...well, he looks sod-all like Ernie, but I've got to call him something, haven't I?
  Once the gang is all aboard, it's off to Liverpool Street we go. For most of the journey, I'll usually be asleep, but that's solely because it's too early in the morning to do anything else. However, a daytime bus journey. should you ever take one, can be a real eye-opener into social dynamics; particularly where the human male is concerned.
  Although I usually get the tube home, an afternoon bus trip in London is a fascinating affair and something you should experience at least once.
  It's all about positioning, you see. Age, status and social standing will subconciously reflect whereabouts on the bus a male will sit if given a choice.
  For example, a very young boy will sit up front on the top right-hand side, as this offers the best view of the road ahead and gives the illusion that he is 'driving'.
  Older boys in a group will always sit on the top deck right at the back so they can sprawl out, talk loudly and indulge in the maximum amount of swaggering and posturing on their way to and from their seats.
  Single young men will sit on top, one row back on the left. This allows them to peer down into the cleavage of any young women getting on at later stops.
  Fat men of any age sit downstairs at the front, as it's the least distance to walk, while old men sit downstairs at the back (preferably on the right) as this is nearest the engine and is always warm.
  Me? Well, married men and working men sit anywhere. We're simply too tired and weary to piss about...
 

I'm a photographer by trade. I've been a photographer for a quarter of a century. It's something I've spent an awful lot of time developing myself in over the years. In fact, I'm so highly trained in my particular field of photography that my department turned round and said "Bill, we've spent a fortune on your training to make you one of our most skilled operatives, let's put you behind a desk looking after shift patterns from now on and really maximise our investment!" But I digress. Again.
  So anyway, as a real-life professional photographer, I always like to keep abreast of new techniques and developments in the field. There are several ways to do this. Certain photographic publications and scientific journals are one way, but for sheer jaw-dropping visual spectacle, you can't beat a photographic trade fair like 'Focus'. For one thing, you get to see all the latest kit from all the major manufacturers, but for me, the most fun is gained by scoping out the enthusiasts...
  For by far the biggest headfuck for anyone casually attending a photographic trade fair is this, fairly fundamental question:
  Why are so many of these idiots wearing cameras with huge telephoto lenses round their necks?
  This, friends, is the domain of my 'amateur' cousin (and by 'amateur', I mean someone who doesn't earn a living in photography, not someone with access to lesser kit. The inverse here is always the norm.) Sadly, there is a certain type of person who positively has to attend a photographic trade show with their latest camera swinging about in front of them like a second dick. These people are always male, always in their sixties and always, ALWAYS have the latest and most expensive bit of kit. In fact, I figured out many years ago that people like the sad old fucker above are precisely the target market for Nikon each time they add a product to their 'professional' range. No professional with bills to pay is ever going to shell out the fat end of five grand for the latest D3X with multiple program modes and fifty-one stage autofocus. Most of the people I work with shoot in manual and 'spot' anyway. Hell, I still don't trust autofocus properly!
  No, I'm convinced that most of the professional camera market is made up of retired old saddoes like our friend here. The only worry I can see for Nikon is twenty years down the line when all these idiots are dead.
  Anyway, getting back to the point, what is it that makes these people come to a professional trade fair wearing their camera? This doesn't happen in any other field of work. Do would-be builders turn up to the Ideal Home Exhibition carrying a trowel? Of course not. I suspect the reason why the amateurs swarm in their droves to events like 'Focus' is for the chance to photograph the one or two bored-looking 'glamour' models that the big companies dress their stands up with. They'd've been disappointed this year though. The only model I saw was a bronzed-up bloke in swimming trunks with impossibly-defined abs (obviously gay).
  Then again, just look at your man here. I'm sure he'd have loved that!

It made my day recently when I discovered that there was a decent coffee shop on the way to my new place of work. I normally prefer Caffe Nero (an extra shot as standard), but Costa will do if there's nothing else. Since I would be passing it every morning, I decided to see if they ran some kind of loyalty scheme. They do, but quite unlike any I've seen before. In fact, I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that the Costa Coffee scheme is pretty much the most blatant and ridiculous corporate piss-take I've ever encountered. Allow me to explain. Most of the coffee shops I've ever known do something like this: you buy a coffee and they give you a little cardboard card with nine boxes printed on. Each time you buy a coffee, they mark a stamp in one of the boxes. Fill all nine and you hand the card in for a free coffee. Buy nine, get the tenth free. Simple.
   Costa have apparently decided that this wasn't good enough. Little bits of cardboard and stamps? How very antiquated! They have instead come up with a nice, shiny 'credit card' type loyalty card and a new points collection system instead. Every time you spend a pound, you get five points added to your card. Only whole pounds count though, so there are only ten points added each time you buy a £2,65 medium coffee. At the back end, when you come to redeem them, each point is worth a penny.
   This means that instead of 'buy nine, get the tenth free' (which Caffe Nero are still offering), Costa's new system works out as 'buy twenty-seven, get the twenty-eighth free'. This, in the complex technical jargon of strategic corporate marketing, is known as 'taking the piss' and, despite my love of vanilla latte, has cost Costa a customer (which is much easier to say after three shots of espresso).
   Disaster! No early morning caffeine bomb for your poor Fish...until I had a look at the other coffee shops on Liverpool Street Station and found a Krispy Kreme hidden away down a side alley at the other end of the concourse. What's more, Krispy Kreme are still doing the old card and stamp routine and theirs is 'buy five, get the sixth free', which is positively stonking! So instead of a vanilla latte on my way to work, I will now be having an Americano and making up the sugar hit with a lovely warm Krispy Creme doughnut. Ok, so it's a little further to walk and about a quid dearer, but I now feel my custom is being valued and no-one is trying to convince me that being had over is in my best interests. Also, given the sort of stubborn bastard that I am, I have now vowed never to set foot in a Costa Coffee again. Way to inspire loyalty there, guys!

Money, money, money. Where has it all gone? Now I'm hardly what you'd call a financial guru, given that I think nothing of spending three quid on a cup of coffee but if, God forbid, I were to lose my job as part of the coalition government's attempt to balance the books, then the three trips a week to Starbucks would stop. There's a big hole where Britain's money was, you see. Labour pissed it all up the wall by giving it out, hand over fist, to all and fucking sundry. But all that has stopped now, you'd think.
   Except you'd be wrong.
   David Cameron has no intention of cutting back on 'foreign aid' at all. Not one jot. It was the first thing that was 'ring-fenced' when the coalition announced its huge program of cuts. Currently, Britain is spending nearly eight billion pounds year on aid to other countries, such as India, Pakistan and China. Eight billion. It's not as if we have this money to give out either. No, we're borrowing it to give to them. What the fuck is going on?
   Last year, we gave £825 million pounds to India for its fucking space programme. UK businesses are laying off people to the tune of several  dozen a minute, VAT will hit 20% in January, yet we give a nuclear-capable country almost a billion quid to play Major Tom on the world stage. Excuse me?
  Then there's Pakistan, the leading exporter of terrorists on the planet today. Despite us bunging them £665 million over a five year period they had the fucking audacity to complain that the rest of the world was a little slow in opening its collective wallet when twenty-one million Pakistanis lost their homes in the recent catastrophic floods. Sorry, but doesn't charity begin at home? Perhaps if the Pakistanis spent a little less on their own 'ring-fenced' projects - such as their nuclear weapons programme - then maybe they wouldn't be so quick to rattle the tin in our direction.
  The most truly baffling donation I discovered, however, was one of £380,000. Not an earth-shattering amount by any stretch of the imagination, except that we gave it to Saudi Arabia; one of the richest nations on the entire planet. We have surely lost the fucking plot here. We still give over £10 million a year to keep an aid presence in China, for fuck's sake! China! If it isn't the biggest financial muscle on the globe, it will be inside twenty years and yet we're still subsidising them? As Ripley once said, "Did I.Q.'s just drop sharply while I was away?"
  Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against giving to charity (and as a taxpayer, I do; Thanks to Dave and Gordon before him,  I have absolutely no say in the matter) but when British hospitals and hospices have to register as charities in order to find the money they need to keep running, then something is very, very wrong. If the object of the coalition cutbacks is to balance the books at home, I don't believe anyone really objects to tightening their belts a bit, but it's got to be across the board. Why should I pay more to feed and clothe my family when we are still allowing every raggedy-arsed grasper with the resourcefulness to reach Sangatte a free fucking pass to a lifetime of benefits and entitlements? You really need to man up about the whole immigration thing a bit sharpish, Dave, because if you don't, it's going to get messy. Running street battles and heads-on-spikes messy. France are already getting a taste, though so far their Left-biased media is keeping a lid on it.
  Final point - five billion a year fighting a 'war' in Afghanistan? No, alright? Just no. We will never, ever come out of this one with the upper hand even if we stay there for a century. The entire might of the former U.S.S.R. gvae it up as a bad job, so I hardly thing the British Army is going to get a result with seven Land Rovers and a pop-gun. Get the fuck out and bring the troops back to British soil. I have a feeling they'll be needed to defend our borders before too much longer Times are tough, there's sod-all in the pot and we need to look after our own first and foremost.
  Oh, and you can stick the Olympics up your arse, too, we can't fucking afford them.

The whole point of setting up this page was to comment on how everything in this once-fine nation of ours is slowly dumbing down to the point of idiocy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our day to day media. I don't know how it happened, but somewhere during the rise of this current generation we, as a country, decided that news was far too boring and that we'd much rather have gossip instead.
  Recently, it was front page headlines that Ronan Keating was getting a divorce. The lead singer from some boy band that was popular a decade ago was splitting with his missus. That was the leading story in a number of tabloids and made the first page on most of the others.
   So. Fucking. What.
   Please explain to me how this even vaguely constitutes 'news'. Please explain who, apart from Ronan himself, Mrs. Keating and possibly his mum would be the remotest bit interested in such trivia. Worse, the tabloids apparently had photographers posted outside his house. Why, for fuck's sake? Do they think him and his Doris are going to play slaps in the living room window for the benefit of the paparazzi? This is not news by any stretch of the imagination. At all. No matter how wrapped up in 'celebrities' you are, no matter how much 'I'm A Big Idol Brother In The Jungle On Ice Factor' you watch, you cannot possibly be satisfied with this sort of shit on the front page of your daily paper, can you?
   Or maybe you can.
   Maybe the popularity of this sort of crap is intentional. Maybe the thought of the collapsing economy, the relentless tide of immigration, the rampant violent crime rate, the uncontrollable feral youth and the state of things in general after thirteen years of a multicultural socialist paradise is so utterly depressing that the only alternative is to sit there in front of the idiot's lantern and be spoon-fed a non-stop diet of Simon Cowell and Ant & Dec. Nah, that can't be right. It's a golden age right now! After all, everyone's a 'university' graduate these days. The jobs market is awash with talent. There are 2:1s or Desmonds in Aromatherapy and Media Studies as far as the eye can see. Not too sure about the amount of honest labourers around though. Those that didn't get to ride the university train. You know, the ones we used to refer to as the 'working class'. From what I can see, most of them appear to be claiming benefits and drinking Stella whilst being paid to breed. I wonder if they've figured out yet that there actually has to be more people putting into the pot than taking out in order for the system to work? Don't worry, they will. Very soon, I'm guessing.
  Actually, now that I come to think about it, the country does still have a 'working class', doesn't it? It's just that we call them 'Poles' these days.
  For my own part, I've come to the conclusion that we as a nation are in some sort of collective denial. We are all standing around with our fingers in our ears going 'la la la' for fear of actually seeing how bad things are. I reckon people would rather read about Jordan's latest spat with Pete than face up to the thought that things are so far in the khazi after Old One Eye and The Eyebrow destroyed the economy that we all might be out of a job soon? (those of us that still have one, that is.)
  I hope this is what's happened; I really do. Because the alternative answer - that the current crop of twentysomethings are simply monumentally fucking thick - is too frightening to comprehend. After all, these will be the ones running the show in a few decades time. The slow 'click, click, click' of IQs winding back that I allude to in the strapline for this page is sounding more and more like an outboard motor these day.
  Frightening...

Yes, it's survey time again. I haven't done a survey post for a while, so I thought I'd regale you with the findings of one that the hotel chain Travelodge decided to undertake a few months back. They wanted to see how much knowledge the average British person had of the British countryside. The results make interesting reading. Interesting in a 'Dear God, what has the nation come to?' kind of way.
  Of the three thousand or so people surveyed, twenty-two per cent could not identify a picture of a hare. Fair enough, I suppose. Most of them would've said 'rabbit', which is understandable. Just. However, things get worse when you find out that one in ten of the people looking at the hare picture thought it was a deer. Following on from this, when shown a picture of a real deer - a red stag, to be precise - twelve per cent of Brits questioned had no hesitation in identifying it as a reindeer, and furthermore swore blind that reindeer were native to Britain. A further thirty-two per cent had difficulty picking out a pheasant (with guesses ranging from partridge to peacock), forty-two per cent didn't know what an otter looked like and an astonishing eighty-three per cent were utterly bafled by a picture of a common bluebell. You know, the little blue flower that's shaped like a bell.
  The killer, though - the absolute jaw-on-the-deck revelation - is that one in ten adults failed to correctly identify a photograph of a sheep. A fucking sheep! For those of you falling into this sorry category, the picture at the top of this article is of an elbow...

Let's have a little chat about insurance, shall we? See, insurance troubles me. I know the reasoning behind why I have to have it, but the fact is, I begrudge every fucking penny I spend on it. Why? Because I've never, ever claimed on either my 'buildings or contents' insurance or my motor insurance and yet the premiums continue to rise every bastard year.
  It didn't used to be like this. I remember as a wee small Fish being royally scalped when I insured my very first motorbike. Twenty-three years of age on a brand new 500cc Yamaha, parked off-road in South London? Five hundred and sixty quid, thank-you very much young man. The following year, as I hadn't killed myself or any other road users, it fell to five hundred and twenty quid. As the years went by and I changed bikes and built up a no-claims bonus, the insurance carried on falling. Same thing with the car premiums. Another year without wiping out any grannies on a zebra crossing, another few notes shaved off the bill.
  And then something strange happened. Around five or six years ago, my insurance started going up. Full nine years no-claims and all of a sudden, I'm paying forty quid more than the previous year. From then on, my insurance quote has gone up annually without fail. Doesn't matter whether it's car, house or bike, the days of paying a lower premium as a reward for not making a claim have gone right out the window.
  Why is this?
  I think there are several answers. For a start, all the insurance companies and underwriters appear to have got together and decided that they never wanted to make a loss ever again. They realised that the British justice system was a complete fucking joke and that nothing would ever be done to clamp down on the number of illegals driving around without insurance, so they simply decided to hike the premiums of all the law-abiding idiots to cover the shortfall. Wankers.
   Secondly, anyone living in a normal area appears to be subsidising the premiums of those fuckwits who insist on living next to, or more frequently in, a river. Year after year these arseholes are washed out of their home in the Thames Valley or Norfolk.  Each winter they move into a caravan for six months while everything dries out and spend thousands of pounds redecorating, only to get washed away again the same time the following year. Yes, it's a lovely picturesque dwelling and I'm sure it was very pretty when you bought it, but it's on a fucking flood plain and when your place on the river becomes a place in the bloody river for six months every year, then it's time to call it a day and move on, because I for one am sick and tired of regularly shelling out on new Axminsters for someone too stupid to take a fucking hint.
   Finally, and most tellingly, I reckon the biggest cause of these endless insurance hikes is the fact that every single company is constantly on the box advertising their fucking selves with our bloody money. Worse, they try to be funny about it. I don't want a comedy rodent in a smoking jacket or a nodding bulldog being amusing at me and I certainly don't want some fat cunt with a bendy moustache singing annoying operatic catchphrases in my general direction every bloody ad break.
  Just piss off with the TV spots and take some money off my bleeding premiums, you utter, utter bastards!

  The English language. A multi-cultural tongue derived from West Germanic, Norse, Anglo-Frisian and Norman roots and moulded by time and use into the wonderfully diverse and lyrically poetic system of speech we use today. It is the official language in fifty-three countries and somewhere between three and four hundred million people have it as their first language and as many as 1.4 billion have it as a second. That's almost two billion people, a third of the entire planet. Thanks to the Industrial Revoultion and the rise of the British Empire, English is now the dominant international language in science, business, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomacy and it has, quite literally, created and shaped the global communication infrastructure of the world today. The Oxford English Dictionary lists over six hundred thousand definitions of words used in English in various forms or guises.
   Yes, the English language is a truly impressive and formidable linguistic creation.    
   So why do so many of the people I come into contact with seem to possess a working vocabulary of approximately thirty-seven words? I can forgive the occasional 'erm' and 'um' as natural breaks in the flow of someone's speech, but it's getting to the point now where if I have to listen to one more shagwit punctuating their pointless utterings with an intermittent stream of 'you know's and 'I mean's, I'm going to stab someone. Worse still is when they combine them, resulting in every sentence being propped up with 'you know what I mean?' No, I don't know what you mean, you cretin, that's why I'm having to waste my time listening to you.   
   Over time, I've slowly come to the conclusion that most people who talk to me have absolutely nothng of any importance to impart. I reckon a good ninety per cent of everything I hear each day is just the result of a bunch of bored, bipedal mammals vibrating their vocal chords for the sheer pleasure of doing so; lowing away in my face simply to annoy me. The sad thing is, I always fall for it. I always start off listening intently when they come up to me, smiling as they begin the conversation and then out flops the first 'you know' and that's it. My eyes glaze over and once more, I'm facing yet another vertical cow mooing at me for no apparent reason.   
   Worse that the 'you know' brigade are the people who insist on speaking in cliched colloquialisms or even outright aphorism. I find these morons a lot easier to deal with though. Every time someone uses the eye-wateringly banal expression 'at the end of the day', I dive in with a quick 'it goes dark' and that's their train of thought derailed immediately. It's astonishing how often people are rendered momentarily silent by this, which just proves my point that they haven't actually got anything to say, they're simply using me as a sounding-board for a quick moo.    
   My most patholigical hatred however, is reserved for those cattle who, for reasons known only to their idiot selves, have decided to become Australian by proxy. Why have they started making all their statements sound like questions by raising the inflection at the end of every sentence? Why do they insist on informing me that they have 'no worries' upon completing our interaction? Why don't they just die?    
   Please don't think I'm being sociopathic here, I'm not. If you genuinely have something to say, then I'm only too pleased to hear it. If you want to have a proper conversation, I'm more than happy to pass the time of day with you, but for the love of God, spend a little time and think about what it is you want to discuss and structure it accordingly. There is nothing more heartwarming than sharing a conversation with someone who knows what a pause is and how to use one. Trust me, you don't have to keep talking continuously in order to converse effectively. Plan ahead, pause once in a while and you'll find yourself more involved in your social interactions than you ever thought possible.  
    I'll leave you with a final thought. Never dismiss the effectiveness of a choice bit of unwarranted viciousness dropped at random into a conversation. A well-timed insult can transform a routine interaction into an intense battle of wills and add interest and conflict to an otherwise dull day.
   Know what I mean, knobhead?

Are you a pirate?
Peter Mandelscum thinks you are, and, let's face it; he's the one 'in charge' of the country these days, so he ought to know. Apparently, old Mandy is ticking right now about the amount of money slipping through his fingers because naughty people are illegally downloading and file-sharing  movies and music, thus depriving huge, multinational media corporations (not to mention the Treasury) of large sums of money. This clearly has to stop, which is why Mandy has decided (after a nice dinner with one David Geffen) to clamp down on file-sharing once and for all. In future, he wants to see your ISP keep an eye on exactly what sites you're visiting and what you're downloading and, if you're being a naughty boy, he wants them to limit (or even terminate) your account. Quite how he expects the ISPs to police this, he doesn't say.
  He patently hasn't heard of 'ghost surfing' either, but I digress.
  The Government's own report into file-sharing (commissioned from Jupiter Research) concluded that some 11.6% of us were engaged, or had engaged in, file-sharing activities while online. As this didn't sound very threatening, the Government then 'tweaked' the figure up to 16.3%. (Interestingly, a bit of digging revealed that Jupiter Research initially assumed that there were 40 million people with 'access to the internet' - never mind that at least five million of them were too young to click a mouse or too old to be arsed. Nor did they take into account those too fucking thick to work out where the free films are and how to get them.) Still, figures are figures, and Mandy's ones showed that a whopping 6.4 million people were obviously dabbling in pirate naughtiness; a figure that somehow became 7 million when the report was actually published. Clearly nonsense, but when has a total lack of credibility ever gotten in the way of a NuLabour mission? As we've seen recently with Professor Nutt's opinions on drugs, whenever the facts don't tally with official NuLabour world view, the Government will simply invent some that do.
  So out came 'The Strategic Priorities for Copyright', which announced that evil British downloaders are stealing some £12 billion worth of copyrighted stuff every year.  They even had the audacity to quote this number, often and loudly, all across the media world a few weeks back. Only it's bollocks. Absolute bollocks.  Even if we go back and actually use Jupiter's figures before the Government jacked them up, then there would be about 3 million 'pirates' stealing that mythical £12 billion. This would mean that each four-person home with an internet connection is pulling down £4000 worth of content every year, or, put another way, spending five hours a day watching films they haven't paid for or listening to music they haven't bought or a combination of both. Now I love a good movie, but three of them? Every single night? Day in, day out? Not even Barry fucking Norman sets that kind of benchmark.
  In reality, like so much of what this Government tells us, these figures are simply horse shit. Yes, there is a piracy problem, but £12 billion worth? Get real.
  So why do people go pirate and what's the solution? Well, it's down to greed. In my opinion, the whole issue of digital piracy would be drastically reduced if the record companies released low quality 'samplers' online. You could play the tracks (in mono, say) for free, and then if you liked the album, you'd buy it. Same goes for movies. Small, three-inch screen versions of the film in question and, if you like it, you'll shell out for the disc.
  Except there's a flaw in this argument.
  An awful lot of gullible people are happily paying on iTunes for precisely that - tiny, tinny versions of the latest films and albums to 'enjoy' on their mobile phone. As long as these morons exist, then the greed of the global media companies will insist that they be milked, which in turn will keep the prices of CDs and DVDs sky-high and ensure that digital piracy will continue unabated.
  Am I a pirate? Hell yes, but one with my own set of ethics. I refuse to buy counterfeit discs because the quality is always, always shit. What I will admit to is using the torrent servers to download low-quality .avi versions of DVDs I think I might like and then watching them on my netbook. If I don't think much of the movie, I delete it. If I like it, I go out and buy the DVD and then delete it. However, when it comes to mp3s, I am scrupulously honest. I always pay for the music I download. Always. Only I'd have to be a complete fucking gibbon to do so via iTunes. No, I go shopping in Russia and so should you. Click on the image at the top of this article and welcome to my world...

Here is the scene in London over the New Year as thousands of shouty Middle-Easterners living in the Big City (joined by one or two of the usual rag-tag crew of Lefty arseholes - Galloway, Alexei Sayle, etc) all got together to go and have a yell outside the Israeli embassy. Apparently, they were protesting about the fact that Israel had decided to unload a long-overdue airstrike against Hamas strongholds in Gaza after putting up with years of random rocket strikes from over the border. How dare they. In the last few days, there's been lots of television footage of wailing bearded gentlemen looking very upset and even more shouty than usual. One of them, I noted, had wrapped his recently deceased child in a Palestinian flag and was shaking her corpse in the air over his head as a throng of his equally shouty kinfolk looked on. Quite what this was meant to achieve escapes me, but I'm sure it all made sense to him. More sense than, say, quietly grieving over her body in the hospital and then leaving her to the care of the undertakers, but, hey, it's a different 'culture', innit? Anyway, such wilful retaliation from those evil Jews against years of random aggression from the Left Bank was simply not on in the eyes of the poor, innocent, downtrodden Palestinians, so they did what any right-thinking individual would do and went en-masse to honk about it in somebody else's country. Let's just reflect on this for a moment, because I cannot think of any other nation on this planet that would put up with this sort of shit. A load of foreign nationals (and one or two Guardian reading tits) march loudly up to the gates of the embassy of another bunch of foreign nationals and kick off, at which point the British Police, on overtime, paid for by the British taxpayer (very few of whom, one supposes, were in the crowd) are called in to keep them apart.
   Am I missing something here? Because if I had a beef with the people of another country and felt that strongly about it, I would go to that country and kick off over there. Getting all righteously indignant and aggressive over here simply doesn't compute for me. It's like Tesco staff marching into Morrisons and having a moan about Sainsbury's. What's the fucking point? Mind you, I know only too well why these 'protestors' are doing their protesting over here. It's because we're too stupid to do anything about it other than play pushy-shovy with them and get sued for 'police brutality' if, God forbid, any of the poor, innocent, peace-loving marching folk fall over and sprain their ankles. These arseholes wouldn't dare try this anywhere else in the world. If they acted like this in the rest of Europe, they'd be hosed off the streets by watercannon. If they tried it in their own countries, they'd be shot. So, what better place to have your little riot than in good old Britian; the land of free speech? (Providing you're on the far Left, of course, absolutely no Right Wing views will be tolerated on pain of immediate prosecution.)
  This country is a joke and the rest of the planet is laughing, loudly, right here on the streets of our Capital. Happy New Year.

On March 28th at 20:30 hours GMT, we will all be encouraged to turn off all our lights as part of Earth Hour. This is in order to raise awareness about energy conservation or global warming or saving the frog or something, I don't know. The reason behind it doesn't matter to me because I won't be pandering to this load of painfully worthy right-on eco-bollocks. In fact, I shall be turning all my lights on for the full hour, as well as flicking the hot water switch and creating a full forty gallons of piping hot water I have no intention of using. For good measure, I will also be racking the central heating up to the 'dole scum' setting of twenty-four degrees and sitting around in my pants enjoying the stifling sub-tropical warmth. Why? Because I am utterly sick of this whole climate change con. Because I despise the way we've all been gullible enough to take this crap as gospel truth without once questioning it and, most of all, because of the stinking, reeking hypocrisy of all these government people and famous-types wagging their holier-than-thou fingers at me for not being 'green' enough. Never mind that right now the skiing in resorts from Scotland to the Alps is the best it's been for half a century, the planet, we keep being told, is getting warmer by the day and we must all be shamed into doing our bit to safeguard our future.
   Right, so if we've established that cutting down our CO2 emissions is of the utmost importance to saving the planet, then Gordon Brown won't be pushing ahead with that new runway expansion at Heathrow, will he? Except, actually, he is. Gordon wants that new runway so he can attract more business investors into London so they'll build more offices in Canary Wharf and then engage in the time-honoured practice of leaving the bastard lights on all bastard night while no one's in them. Here's the hypocrisy. You, the little people, have to squint at your newspaper under a flickering 'energy-efficient' light bulb while the important City banking types (the ones that are responsible for your house being worth a third less than it was last year) get to leave all the lights on in all the offices in their custom-built skyscrapers just in case they feel the urge to pop back for a quick snort of coke or a boff of their secretary. It's not just the bankers and politicians, either. The luvvies are hassling us, too. Cutting down on greenhouse gasses is a very big issue for Emma Thompson. So much so that she was right at the front of the last demonstration against Gordon's Heathrow expansion (deliciously ironic - Lefty vs. Lefty.) So does her oh-so-right-on stance mean Emma will be swimming to the fucking Oscars this year, then? Of course not. She'll be Club Class or better sipping Bolly all the way there and back. That's because the rules don't apply to Emma, just to little people like you and me.
   This whole sorry eco-bandwagon has now filtered its way down to a local level, too. For instance, I keep getting asked if I want a 'bag for life' every time I go into a supermarket. Why? Am I expected to carry a couple of these stout hessian things around with me every time I leave the house on the off chance that I might need some groceries? Balls to that, I want plastic bags. Lots of them. In fact, from now on, I want each individual Item I purchase placed in it's own plastic bag. And if it's a bottle, I want that wrapped in a couple of plastic bags before being placed in a plastic bag. I fully intend to take up drinking wine again just so I have some bottles in the weekly shop for them to put into plastic bags. Fuck 'em. Here's the hypocrisy again. The supermarkets could easily provide us with strong paper bags if they wanted to but they choose plastic ones instead because they're cheaper. They know damn well that paper bags biodegrade in weeks while plastic ones take decades, but they don't care. And if they don't care, then why should you? The same supermarkets also happily charter dozens of cargo-ships and aircraft to import huge amounts of exotic produce into the country every week and then chuck it away the moment it goes ten minutes out of date. When I was a kid, you could only get strawberries a couple of months every year because they were seasonal. Now, you can get them all year round, they just ship them in from warmer climes. It's not just strawberries, either. There's a bewildering array of stuff from kiwi fruit to kumquats sitting there on shelf after shelf, slowly going off, and all of it brought into the country on huge fossil-fuel burning vehicles spewing ton after ton of CO2 into the atmosphere. Want to save the planet? Stop eating strawberries. Or kiwi fruit. Or pineapples. In fact, just stick with a nice homegrown English pippin instead. Except you can't, because last time I looked, English strains of apples were being imported from Europe because we've uprooted most of our orchards on an EU directive and the ones that are left have been geared up to producing inedible varieties for the cider industry.
   Anyway, forget fruit, what about the rest of the shopping? What's with all this packaging? I buy a pizza and it's wrapped in cling film. Fine, but then It's sold in a nice big printed box with a picture on. How much did it cost to produce that box; to print it? How much will it cost to re-cycle it? It's the same story with breakfast cereal. They even sell individual portions of breakfast cereal in individual cartons complete with an individual serving of milk. What the fuck is all that about? So you can take your breakfast with you and eat it at work? Well, yes, you could do that. Alternatively, you could simply get your lazy fucking arse out of bed ten minutes earlier and eat your corn flakes in your own kitchen like normal people, but I digress. Anyway, If you think the pizza and cereal packaging is extreme, check out the ready meals. An endless array of plastic trays hiding inside cardboard boxes with the occasional sachet of sauce, add to taste. Could they not be sold in microwave pouches? And chocolates. Do we really need each one of Terry's finest in it's own individual niche on a plastic tray along with a separate cardboard 'menu' to select them from? What's wrong with a bag? Supermarkets are full of this sort of bollocks. They tell you they're helping you to save the planet and save your pennies and yet there they are, adding masses of pretty packaging, charging you for it and then begrudging you a fucking bag to take it home in. Still, 'every little helps' right?
   Nah, sorry, I'm not buying it. Count me out; I don't want to play anymore. All this began because Al Gore lost an election to a halfwit and then had to find something else to do with his life. He hit upon the idea of climate change and then made a very nice living flying all around the world dumping tons of CO2 into the sky in order to tell us all about it. Well fuck Earth Hour and fuck all the eco-warriors. From now on, you can call me the anti-Gore. One man can make a difference. From this day forth, I shall turn on every light switch I walk past at work. In fact, I shall make a point of going into rooms I have no business going into simply to turn on the lights. I shall boil the work's kettle and then not make tea. I shall leave the engine running on the work's van while I go for a tea break (on the occasions that I do make tea.) I shall, in short, do everything in my power to counter all the efforts that the gullible people are making up and down the country and I hereby promise not to rest until my own personal carbon footprint is the size of a fucking clown's shoe.
   Up yours, Al.

Well, I think we can safely start calling this 'credit crunch' a recession now, don't you? The mighty MFI went to the wall yesterday and they've been closely followed by Woolworths, who, after ninety-nine years, have finally gone under. Much is being made in the papers of the demise of these two giants and how it shows that this economic downturn is going to be far worse than anyone can imagine. Probably, but in the case of MFI and Woolies, the problems were, in my opinion, a touch closer to home. To wit; they were run by idiots. MFI has for years tried to make a living flogging four-hundred quid sofas by spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on television advertising stuffed into every programme break on every Bank Holiday. They always tried to convince us that the four-hundred quid sofa you were looking at was a bargain because they'd hidden it at the back of the warehouse for a day or two with a thousand pound price tag on it and then wheeled it back in and told you in excited tones about the fantastic six-hundred pound saving. Believe it or not, this sort of shrill, hysterical selling was amazingly popular in the Seventies. In today's world though, nobody over the age of twelve was taken in by it. Unfortunately, nobody under the age of twelve has four hundred quid for a sofa, or would purchase one if they had, so bye bye MFI and hello to somewhat quieter Boxing Day telly.
   Woolworths, on the other hand, have only themselves to blame and I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did. They simply didn't know what they wanted to be. They wanted to compete with HMV as a music store yet they only sold the top forty. They wanted to compete with Homebase as a hardware store yet only sold bulbs and plugs. About all they were shifting at the end was pic n' mix, and sorry, but foam shrimps and fizzy cola bottles ain't gonna keep a one hundred and twenty-five store empire afloat, are they? So adios to another dinosaur.
   Never fear though, I'm sure there'll be plenty more big names following suit over the coming twelve months or so. Firms who simply have no idea about either their product or the current state of the market. Take Sony UK for example, who steadfastly refuse to allow the big supermarkets to discount the PS3 and then remove the backwards-compatibility chip from all the new models just in time for Christmas, so that new buyers can no longer play their old PS2 games on them. Great move from the Japanese parent company, there! Or Honda UK who have, astoundingly, put the average price of their motorcycles up by two hundred quid just as Alistair Darling knocks two and a half percent off the VAT to try and tempt us to part with our cash. Utterly baffling.
   Finally, while I'm on the subject of our beloved badger-faced Chancellor and the eye-watering amount of debt he's saddling the nation with, Let me remind you what the late, great Winston Churchill had to say on the subject. He said that 'trying to spend one's way out of a recession was akin to a man standing in a bucket and trying to pick himself up by the handle.' Quite. It's going to be a fun 2009, people.
   Merry Christmas to you and your debt.

Concerns have been raised over figures just released that show twenty-six teenagers - some as young as fifteen - were tasered on the streets of London in the first eight months of 2008. For those of you unfamiliar with the device, the taser is a small pistol-like unit that delivers an excrutiatingly painful five-second burst of electricity (up to fifty thousand volts worth) which instantly drops any target, lights up every single one of their pain-receptors and turns them into a shrieking, quivering mess on the ground. All muscle control goes and even after the power is turned off, the target is left shaking and drooling for several moments. The effects wear off after a few minutes, and there is no evidence that any permanent harm is done to the tasered person, apart from the retention of an extremely strong impression that they really don't want to be tasered again anytime soon.
   Some of the more illuminated sections of our society aren't happy with this, and feel that this figure is inexcusably high and that tasering is no way to treat a wayward teenager. I disagree. Having encountered some of the mouthy gangs of juvenile pondlife on street corners here in Lambeth, I'm of the opinion that a figure of twenty-six is nowhere near high enough and that tasering is the only way to treat a wayward teenager.
   In fact, I believe that all teenagers between the ages of fifteen and nineteen should be given a quick five-second breakdance on the end of a taser wire once every few months or so as a matter of routine. Those kids who regularly skip school should be the first ones targeted, with some sort of regular, structured, classroom-based tasering phased in over the next few years. This, I feel, would be wonderfully character-building for the little gobshites, as well as providing them with an excellent sense of perspective. There are also many benefits to had for the police too, not least of which being the doubly painful (and visually impressive) 'arcing' effect that will occur from any concealed blade the little toerags may be carrying.
   Teenagers often complain about how 'boring' and 'unfair' their life is. Trust me, kids - fifty thousand volts up the jacksie can be considered many things, bot 'boring' isn't one of them. No, I've given this some serious thought and I'm happy that this is the only way forward. Ultimately, I reckon an organised programme of routine youth-zapping would contribute greatly to the overall reduction of crime in the Capital.
   Who knows, it might even clear their acne up, too.

Look at this. This is one of the dishes created by celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal and served at his triple Michelin-starred restaurant, 'The Fat Duck' in Bray, Berkshire. Quite a few people have been looking at this dish recently. Forty of them have seen it more than once in the same twenty-four hour period, after an attack of diarrhoea and vomiting cut a swathe through Heston's diners, with some four hundred people complaining that they were ill following a meal at the Duck. Now let me strenuously point out that these people were not laid low by food poisoning. Blumenthal's restaurant regularly sends off samples of his dishes for routine analysis and he employs a firm to specifically look after the Health and Safety side of his business. No, it turns out that three of his staff and five of his customers were found to have the dreaded norovirus, or 'winter vomiting bug'.
   Whatever the cause, the restaurant is now back up and running and there is still a long queue of people wishing to sample Heston's creations, such as the one pictured above. Know what it is? Well, this is one of Blumenthal's signature dishes, the famous 'snail porridge' which is part of his £130 a head 'tasting menu', which also includes such delights as Anjou Pigeon Black Pudding, Quail Jelly, Oak Moss and Truffle Toast, Poached Salmon in Licquorice and Bacon and Egg Ice Cream. If you don't fancy any of that, there's always the £98 A La Carte menu, featuring such delights as Crab Biscuits, Cauliflower Risotto, Langoustine and Pig's Trotter Lasagne (eight pounds supplement payable) and Lamb with Ice Filtered Lamb Jelly.
   Heston's biography states that his work 'researches the molecular compounds of dishes so to enable a greater understanding of taste and flavour', and he has been awarded an Honorary Degree by The University of Reading for his dedicated research and commitment to the exploration of culinary science and, in particular, his 'original and scientific approach to the molecular breakdown of cuisine'. Hmmm...quite.
   For me, being a working-class yob, the whole point of dining out is to go and have a meal that someone else is cooking. I want tasty food at a reasonable price and lots of it. What I don't want is a cornet full of fried breakfast and the chance of an evening on the toilet, which is why my idea of a good restaurant is this place. Like I said, I'm a yob. I might not have as much class as Heston's usual clientelle, but neither have I found myself with my head down the khazi after eating out any time recently.
   I suspect we're back in 'modern art' territory here. Some people will always be happy to spend their money simply for snob value. You might be only too pleased to book months ahead for the chance to spend north of three hundred quid taking the missus out for a mouthful of mollusc, some tree-scrapings on toast and a nice bottle of wine. I, on the other hand, smell a rat. Or is it a pigeon?
  Don't get me wrong; I have a palate. I'm quite capable of savouring the delicate piqancy of fresh sushi or the robustness of a good fois gras, it's just that when the bill is coming out of my wallet, I like to leave feeling as though I've actually fucking eaten something, which is why, given the option, the food served at Mad O' Rourke's is always going to win out over the the dainty, oh-so-pretty culinary creations championed by the Michelin joints.
   Quantity, as well as quality. I think you know where I'm coming from.
   Keep your pureed Helix Aspersa, Heston. I'll take the Desperate Dan Cow Pie and the pint of Lumphammer, ta very much...

   (By the way, you may be interested to hear that the one person I know who has actually partaken of The Fat Duck's 'tasting menu' ended up grabbing a bag of chips on the way home because he was, and I quote, 'fucking starving'.)

When I started work we had a 'Manpower' unit. Then, sometime in the nineties, they became 'Personnel'. A couple of years ago they changed their name once more to 'Human Resources'. Another few years and the political correctness will be complete and I can look forward to having my records looked after by the 'Carbon-Based Bipedal Lifeform Logistics Conclave'. Sweet.

April 23rd. Does this date mean anything to you? Well, no, apparently not, judging by my experience today. April 23rd is St. George's Day. St. George, for those of you who are unaware (and there are obviously a few), is the patron saint of England. So, given the fact that I live in the Capitol city of England, you'd expect that I'd've seen quite a few red and white flags during the day, wouldn't you? Especially since I had to travel from my home in South London all the way up to Edgware in the north and back again.
  Know how many flags I saw? One. And I was fucking wearing it.
  I am positively incandescent with rage as I type this. What the hell are you people playing at? The one day each year we, as the English, have to shout a message to the sinister Socialists running our country that we're proud of our nation and we - correction you - blow it. Still, I've no doubt a good few of you were togged up to the nines all in green for St. Patrick's Day back in March though. Out 'enjoying the craic' and getting trolleyed on the black stuff. Yet, when it comes to sticking on the old red and white once a year and raising a pint of ale to your own nation's patron saint - nothing.
  This is exactly what Nu-Labour wants from you. Total subjugation. That way, once you're Englishness has been eradicated, you won't mind, or even notice, that you're paying for the Scots to have free presciptions, healthcare, student tuition, transport etc, will you? Because, hey, we're all 'British' now, aren't we? Somehow, we, as a nation, have managed to be convinced that celebrating our Englishness is wrong. Racist. A harking back to colonialism and slavery. It's bollocks, of course, but we've fallen for it haven't we? Wake up, people. How the hell is it 'racist' to wear the colours of your country in your country on your patron saint's feast day? You do it often enough when the perennially under-achieving 'En-ger-land' football team plays, so why in God's name can't you pull the shirt on once a year on the 23rd of April?
  Yes, it's vulgar and jingoistic and ever-so-slightly low-brow, but then again, so are the Proms, but we have no problem swelling with pride when we can rope our Scottish and Welsh 'pals' in, do we? But try to muster a bit of self-pride on our own as a nation without a sporting event to hide behind and we just can't do it. Because we're frightened. Frightened that someone might point the finger and call us a racist. A Nazi. A BNP voter. We've been bullied into submission for the sake of a quiet life because we can't bear the thought of being accused of rocking the great 'multi-cultural' boat.
  Never mind that St George, if he ever existed, was more than likely a Turkish soldier from the Third Century and all that stuff about dragons was myth and metaphor. It's the fact that he is a symbol of England's existence as a seperate entity from the not-so-United Kingdom that the ruling classes despise, and so they've quietly spent the last decade and a half systematically fading him, and his feast day, into the background to the point where, here and now barely two hundred years after Trafalgar, you all sit there too ashamed of your great nation's past to buy a flag to stick in your car window for a couple of hours.
  You make me sick.

In an idle moment today, I decided to price-up my once-in-a-lifetime dream holiday: a month in Japan. Unfortunately, it all fell apart at the British Airways website. (*adopts best Columbo accent*) See, there's something I just don't understand. How come I can get an Economy flight for just shy of five hundred notes, yet Business Class costs over fifteen hundred and First Class is knocking on for five grand. Yet - and please excuse me if I've got the wrong end of the stick here - you're all on the same plane. So basically, the difference between five hundred and five grand would appear to be limited to soft furnishings, menu choice and attention from the waitress, correct? I'm sorry, but even being spoon-fed caviar by a topless Kelly Brook whilst reclining on a leather Chesterfield could not convince me to pay ten times more for what is basically the same service. Not when the chances are I'll be quietly sedated on liquid refreshments beforehand and will probably sleep for most of the trip anyway. How do airlines stay in business at these prices? I'm scratching my head here. Anyway, for those of you who've always wondered what the difference between Economy and First Class really was, there's your answer. A decimal point.

I for one am totally fed up with the Royal Family. After reading about yet another drunken night out for Prince Harry and his big brother's shenanigans with the helicopter, I think it's about time we had a bit of a change. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating the abolition of the monarchy, far from it. I just feel that the current batch are past their sell-by date and we need to have a reboot of the franchise.
  You see, I've just read David Starkey's fascinating series of books 'Monarchy', and basically, the whole 'Royal' thing is just a pale shadow of it's former self these days. I look at sour-faced old Liz and the retard son lined up to replace her and frankly, I'm not impressed. Centuries of European Royalty interbreeding to keep the bloodlines pure has resulted in the human equivalent of pedigree Chihuahuas. Chinless, highly-strung idiots incapable of dealing with the real world without a minder to look after them.
  No, it's time to go back to the fundamental basics of Royalty, where you got to be King because you were a charismatic leader of men in possession of a few hundred mates with fucking big swords. It worked for William in 1066, and there's no reason why we can't have the same again. Just think - if some big, blustering bastard clad head-to-toe in iron plate stormed into Buckingham Palace with a load of Knights, slaughtered Her Madge and her inbred offspring, stuck all the heads on the gates and said "Right, I'm the fucking King now, who wants some?", you'd be impressed, wouldn't you? You'd think 'Yes, here's a born ruler; a strong man unafraid to take charge of a situation. I could follow him!' and quite right, too. That's how it worked for centuries and it set the cornerstone for the wonderful cosmopolitan society we live in today. We need to go back to this; to resurrect our national pride in our Monarchy.
   So who do we get to rule us? Who should be the new King of England? (because the first thing he's going to do is march his troops north to sort those bloody Scotchmen out, obviously.) Well, I have an idea. A decent king needs to look the part, so we need someone physically imposing; a big bugger to fill that armour. Next, he would need wisdom and maturity, so someone in their fifies or sixties who's been around a bit would fit the bill nicely. Also, as a leader of men, he would need a powerful voice to ensure his commands were heard and obeyed. When you put all these criteria together, there's really only one candidate - Brian Blessed.
  Shit, the man even has experience of being royalty, he's played loads of 'em! Just watch 'Flash Gordon' to see him as Vultan, Prince of the Hawk-Men. Can't imagine this King talking to trees and selling his own range of expensive groceries, can you? He's climbed Everest, for God's sake! No, it'd fighting, wenching and drinking all the way for King Brian!
  Visualise the coins of the realm, too. No more saggy-chinned old ladies on the back of the pound coin, just huge, great beards! And just imagine the Christmas Day message from this bloke! He'd be half-drunk on mead by three o'clock and bawling at you in your very own living room, it'd be aces!
  No, that's it, I'm sold. Brian Blessed for Regent! Remember - as things stand now, the moment old Queen Elizabeth carks it, those treacerous Australians are going republican because they've lost all interest and respect for the Royal Family. That's not going to happen with King Brian in charge, is it? He'll be straight out on the next Hercules to give those yampy ex-cons a fucking good shouting at.
  Come on Brian, history awaits! Round up some mates and get those claymores sharpened. All hail King Brian the First! Marvellous!

One of the earliest Rants I had on first incarnation of this site was against scooters. At the time I was a recently exed-biker who had just gotten rid of a Kawasaki ZZR-600 and was looking forward to purchasing a Suzuki 1200 Hayabusa. Unfortunately, fate (read: 'pregnancy') intervened and here I am, five years later, looking at this and thinking it's the very thing. Now after half a decade of not freezing my cobs off every morning straddling a (let's be honest) somewhat uncomfortable (but really sexy) motorbike to get into work, I'm toying with the idea of getting back on two wheels again. This time, however, I'm old enough not to give a rat's arse about how I look or the performance of the machine. This baby will give me 120 miles an hour on the motorway, sixty miles to the gallon and will cost me less than two hundred notes to insure. Also, there'll be no clunky gear-changing and I can sit in a sedate, relaxed position while I get there. All this and ABS braking, too. Not quite 'Ogri', I know, but I'm still toying with the idea of a test-ride. I'll let you know how I get on if I do...

Here I am on a glorious morning in early March. The sun is shining, the sky is blue and the steam from my freshly-filtered coffee is wafting lazily in front of my monitor. All is right with the world. Except it shouldn't be. You see, last night Gordon Brown (you remember him - he's the unelected Prime Minister of this Septic Isle. The one who puts his fingers in his ears and goes 'la-la-la' when anyone tries to remind him of the manifesto promises his party made, such as offering the country a vote on the EU Referrendum. But I digress...) Anyway, last night old Gordon had 'emergency' talks with boffins from the Met Office about the massive storm front bearing down on Britain in the early hours of this morning. There was talk of eighty mile an hour winds, huge tidal surges of a metre or more and chaos on a par with 1987. Apparently at one point, the situation looked so bleak that a hitherto unprecedented number of flood warnings were issued, fifteen flights from Heathrow and eleven from Gatwick were cancelled, the port of Dover was closed and radio stations were telling their listeners to stay indoors. Mention was made of the Great Storm of 1703, when eight thousand people shuffled off this mortal coil courtesy of the wind, rain and tides. Scary stuff! I went to be last night fully expecting to be woken in the wee small hours by the sound of the roof and the flat upstairs tearing loose and heading skyward to the land of Oz at high velocity. Except I woke to a shaft of sunlight and the singing of the blackbird in our apple tree as per usual. And when I checked the news - the BBC 'state propoganda' news - I found that the 'killer storm' of last night had suddenly transformed into 'persistent heavy rain'. Curious.
   So where was the trail of carnage and destruction we'd been promised? I was completely at a loss to explain until I realised that we have a Budget coming up this week. Suddenly it began to make sense. What better way to generate huge amounts of revenue than to indulge in a good old-fashioned bit of scaremongering? 'Look everyone! Climate change is here! Flood and disaster for all! The only way you can stop it is to give us more taxes!' That's how this Government thinks, you see. All climate change is as a result of you and your cars and electrical appliances. Never mind the fact that the biggest storm this nation ever saw was three hundred years ago, way before the the Industrial Revolution. Never mind that Boscastle was recorded as being washed into the sea over four hundred years ago. And again in 1847. No, YOU, the proletariat, with your filthy internal combustion engines; YOU are the cause of all this. Al Gore said so, so it must be true. Ignore the fact that volcanic activity and cattle stick thirty times the amount of CO2 into the atmosphere that vehicles do, just cough up now and Alistair will put things right. What will actually happen is that Alistair will use most of the new taxes he's going to hit you with to fill up the hole he's made bailing Northern Rock out. Well, I say 'Alistair', I actually mean 'Gordon'. Blaming Alistair Darling for the balls-up that New Labour has made of the economy is a bit like Parky blaming Emu for chucking him over the sofa. Still, only two years to go until we can vote this shower out. Personally, I'm counting the days...

I've been listening to Radiohead. No, hang on! I got tired of constantly reading about how brilliant they were and so I decided to do a little downloading and really check them out properly. I felt I owed it to myself (and Thom Yorke) not to slag them off anymore without really knowing any of their work. (This is in stark contrast to my opinions of U2, as I'm very familiar with their work, having had it hammered into me by an old girlfriend, meaning that I have no qualms whatsoever in labelling them as overblown, derivative bollocks.) So the last couple of evenings have been spent listening to 'The Bends', 'Kid A' and 'OK Computer' (the best album ever made, apparently.) Know what conclusion I came to? They're the new Smiths. Seriously, for the 'nobody understands me/life is so unfair' type of student, Radiohead offer a far more realistic outlook on things than Morrissey and Marr ever could. The music is less catchy and the lyrics more morose with none of the political side-swipes getting in the way of a good moan. Having said that, though, one or two songs really stood out, and I'm sure I'd have just loved 'Creep' and 'Karma Police' in my college days. Naturally, back then I too was riddled with teenage angst, but I was always more 'screw you' than 'woe is me', which is why I spent more time listening to Marillion than Morrissey. Fish wrote about his girlfriend leaving too, only with him the lyrics were more about posting nude pictures of her to all her friends rather than moping over her memory alone in a bedsit. Venom. That was always the key ingredient for me. There's only so much sorrow and pity I can take before I want to choke someone. Anyway, back to the point. Radiohead. Perfectly acceptable if you're nineteen, pasty from lack of sunlight and little bit morose. Otherwise, avoid. There. Analysis over, Captain. Deleting files now...

Have a look at this. Lovely, isn't it? This, for all you lagerboys out there, is called 'beer'. It's what your dad drinks, because he's a man. It's not 'superchilled', it doesn't have a 'creamflow' head and you don't get a slice of lime to stuff in it. It is simply a mixture of water, yeast, barley and hops. That's it. In your local Wetherspoons, it goes for less than two quid a pint, so why are you idiots paying three and a half quid for Stella? Oh yes, it must be all the extra ingredients you're getting, like Ammonia Caramel, which gives it some colour, Rhoiso-alpha Acid, which increases bitterness and Propylene Glycol Alginate, which stops it frothing all over the shop while it's, ahem, 'brewing'. Let's not forget all those other free chemicals you're getting, too. The ones they stick in to speed up the brewing process (and therefore their profits), such as Betaglucanase, Protease, Tetrahydroiso-alpha acid, Sulphur Dioxide, Amyloglucosidase, Silicone and last but not least, Sulphuric Acid. (This, believe me, is by no means an exhaustive list.) Hmm...'Reassuringly expensive' indeed.
   Now you may not know this, but 'lager' is a German word meaning 'storage'. That's because in Germany, brewing is controlled by very strict laws and has to mature for quite a while (up to a month or two in certain cases). Over here, most of the big-name lagers brew for a few days at most. The brewing process is artificially kick-started, artificially stopped and artificially pumped full of nitrogen to liven it up again. The reason they serve it 'superchilled' is because the human taste-bud doesn't work too well at low temperatures, so you don't realise that what you're drinking doesn't actually taste of anything. That's why all the money gets ploughed back into promotion - to keep their low-quality product in your mind. Dude, you're not drinking lager, you're drinking advertising.
   Real Ale, on the other hand, is a living product. It's fresh, full of natural ingredients and is served from a hand-pump (because it doesn't need to be pumped full of nitrogen to give it some 'zing'.) It's cheaper, it has some taste and it doesn't require a costly refrigeration system (which you pay for). There are loads of different types, from 3.5% Milds to 8% Strong Ales, so if you only drink Stella because it's 5% and makes you feel like a big man, why not give Hobgoblin or Abbot a go? They're just as strong, are full of flavour and won't make you feel like a pig has shat in your head the following morning. Natural ingredients, see?
   So that's it. You can carry on paying over the odds for a pint of dead chemicals, or you can try a fresh, lovingly-crafted product. If you're still not convinced and insist on being a lagerboy, at least go for an imported one, like Becks or Heineken that are brewed to strict German and Dutch quality laws which forbid them being pumped full of shit. If you're unsure what to go for, a quick rule of thumb is this: If it says 'Brewed under licence in the UK' on it - it's piss. At the end of the day though, it's your choice. I'm really not bothered so long as you take the time to think about what you're sticking down your neck.
   Click on the pint glass if you want to know more...
   Cheers!

God bless the Freedom Of Information Act (2000) for allowing me to share this one with you. Ok, as you know, in 2012 London will be hosting the Olympics (an event that has virtually bankrupted every city it's touched since Montreal in '76, but I digress) Anyway, figures for the past twelve months have shown that a sum of eighty-seven million pounds has been paid to a 'consultancy' firm to - and I swear I'm not making this up - 'ensure that the cost of the London Olympics 2012 are kept down'. Now, given that the lowest-paid member of this eight-strong 'Senior Management Team' at the ODA (Olympic Delivery Authority) was paid £243,000, I have to ask - and quite reasonably, I feel - WTF? Because if the object of this quango is to find ways of keeping the cost to the London taxpayer (that'd be me) down, then I for one can think of one really easy way of saving, ooh, say £87,000,000. Anyone else spot it?

This Government's getting better and better, isn't it? The latest brainwave from old badger-chops Alastair Darling is a proposed 75dB noise limit on motorcycle exhausts, which would effectively remove Ducati and Harley-Davidson from British roads to name but two. Darling's idea comes hot on the heels of his proposal that we all pay by the mile for the privilege of driving. Where does this bloke get them from? Does he come up with these things during some sort of opium-induced coma, or what? If he really fancies reducing the noise on British roads, then he could start by doing something about those bastards with car stereos so fucking loud the vibrate your windscreen, let alone theirs. Thanks to Big Al and his chums in the Ministry for Transport it's now a dangerous offence to drive with one hand off the wheel as you answer your mobile, but apparently it's all tickety-boo to have your internal organs resonating at seven hertz as you zoom along, totally unable to hear any ambulance that may be coming. Will he be doing anything about these jokers? Will he cock! He knows damn well that the main culprits of this antisocial behaviour are of a certain , ahem, 'ethnic background', so there's no way he'll risk the Government being labelled as 'racist' by ordering the police to clamp down on them. Meanwhile, all the decent law-abiding motorcyclists out there find themselves swapping the Fireblade for a Vespa in the next couple of years to ensure quieter roads for everyone. Everyone apart from the Radio Brixton boys in their Five-Series BMWs, that is.

It seems like every time I pick up the paper, I'm confronted with yet another story of some poor bastard being murdered by some piece of shit who has been released from prison on parole. This whole parole thing really annoys me. All this 'time off for good behaviour' bollocks. Er, no. If you're sentenced to five years, then five years is what you should do. Being a good boy whilst you're inside ought to be irrelevant. If you wanted to demonstrate how good you can be, you should've done it on the outside instead of being a scrote, shouldn't you? That way, you wouldn't find yourself in this situation. Being sentenced to five years should mean that you get out in exactly five years, provided you choose not to sod about and do drugs or play the tough guy. If you do, then more gets added to your sentence until you get the message. As for the view that prison should not be about punishment but about rehabilitation; who came up with that particular gem and why weren't the rest of us asked how we felt about it? As a taxpaying mug shelling out forty per-cent, I object most strongly to seeing rapists and child-murderers being given three square meals a day in a centrally-heated environment with access to satellite television and the internet when I have to get up at half-five every fucking morning and got to work full time to enjoy the same set-up.
   It's even more annoying when it's an illegal immigrant who shouldn't even have been in this country in the first place; especially when three meals a day and a bed constitutes a luxury hotel in some parts of the world. Some old pipe in a wig has also ruled recently that prisoners should all be eligible to vote. Hang on, whatever happened to the concept of 'outlaw'? Surely if you voluntarily choose, by your actions, to remove yourself from civilised society then you should no longer be allowed a say in how it's run. If law didn't apply to you when you chose to commit a crime then why should you be included under its umbrella when you're banged up? Take away the vote and the privileges and the remission and make prison harsh again. Never mind the degree-study opportunities and gymnasium, let's have some rock-breaking. We keep getting told that the reason these poor, misguided young scamps have to be let out early is because of overcrowding. Build more fucking prisons, then. Or, better still, make the ones we've got so brutal and unpleasant that no-one will want to go there. Simple, isn't it? Never happen though, because in the current political climate, the Human Rights of the incarcerated wrong-doer far outweigh those of the law-abiding Joe on the street.
   Still, there is a way to change all this. You can start by getting off your arse and down to a polling station on May 4th. Rest assured the crack-head who burgled you last year will be putting his tick in the box; he knows which side his bread's buttered. Hell, they'll even bring his ballot paper to him

This is the Intrepid Fox on Wardour Street. It's the best pub I've ever set foot in and has been my spiritual home in London for nigh on two decades. It has two floors dedicated to alternative music and whether you're a rocker, a punk, a goth or a post-nu-metal-cybergrunge weirdo, you'll feel at home here. The tunes are great, there's cold Newcastle to be necked and there's always a game of pool on the go and fine people to talk to. I've lost count of the number of great nights I've had in the 'Fox, but it's not just my favourite boozer, it's also a living piece of London history. It was founded as a pub in 1784 by Whig leader Charles James Fox, who promised free beer to anyone who'd vote for him. It survived the Blitz intact and the Sixties saw Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger trading punches at the bar when Mick poached Ronnie Wood from Rod's band 'The Faces'. In the early Seventies, Actors Richard Harris, Tom Baker and writer Daniel Farson were regularly thrown out after colossal benders under it's roof and later in the same decade, Malcolm McLaren and a certain John Lydon adopted it as their local as they proceeded to change British music forever. So with all that in it's past, you'd think it's future as an icon of Cultural Heritage would be secure, wouldn't you? Well, you'd be wrong. It's owners Mitchells & Butlers have sold it off to property developers who plan to completely gut it and build a 'new and exciting development' (expensive flats for wankers) in it's place. The landlord, Pat Begent, who has run the joint for all the years that I've been going there has been given less than a month to get out and, quite rightly, calls the decision "a fucking travesty". What's worse, M&B deliberately kept the sale 'under the radar' so that Pat couldn't mount any sort of counter-bid or campaign. It stinks, people, it really does. I've spent half my life drinking in the 'Fox; usually before heading round the corner to a gig at The Astoria, which I've also found out this week will be closing soon, too - again, to be converted into flats and shops. What the hell is going on? That's it, I've had enough of this city. It's mean and cold and I don't like it here anymore.

As I write this, six people are in intensive care as a result of a drug trial going horribly wrong. I don't mean that a Colombian warlord has ordered them whacked, I mean that these guys were human guinea-pigs for a pharmaceutical company testing programme and things went a bit Doctor Jekyll for them the moment the syringe went in. Apparently, the six men suffered an extreme reaction to a new 'antibody therapy' drug called TGN1412 and began screaming and writhing around as their heads swelled up to three times their normal size and all their major organs shut down in alphabetical order. Predictably, the media wasted no time in jumping on this story and are currently making a big issue of how the head of TeGenero AG, the drug company in question, refuses to offer an apology to the families of these men. Quite right too. Why the fuck should he apologise to these idiots? They all volunteered to be injected with something that had never been tested on humans before and were each paid two thousand quid for their troubles. Apparently, at least one of them is a 'serial guinea-pig' who does this for a living and is reported to have made over sixty grand from similar trials over the last few years. Far from wanting an apology, I would have thought this cretin would be only too pleased with his new massive head. It'll mean more surface-area available in which to stick the needles in any future money-making activities...

'F' is for Freemasons: Reading this site you may come to the conclusion that I don't have a great deal of time for Freemasons and you'd be right. Now I'm aware that they're a very old and very worthy organisation and that they do a great deal of work for charity and I'm not knocking that. I'm also aware that membership of an exclusive club with secret signs can provide an enormous amount of comfort for a certain type of chap. I was in the Tufty Club myself when I was seven and I've still got the badge to prove it. No, I don't begrudge these fellows their evenings out with their aprons and their complicated handshakes. They deserve all the joy they undoubtedly get from their Tubal Cains and their Boazes.   
    What I do object to is that specific tenet of the Masonic code that insists that each Mason is obliged to help a fellow Mason wherever possible, which all the ones I've ever come into contact with have taken to mean 'promote all the other Masons you can find.' In my organisation, this leads to people being put in charge of areas they know nothing about, where they then rely on the people already in that area to do all the work; which the newly promoted Mason subsequently takes the credit for. This ensures both advancement in the lodge and a trip up the pay scale for the lucky Frat Boy, and a good deal of bitterness and resentment for those tasked with making him look good.    
    Last year, I spent weeks and weeks of my free time worrying over something that was absolutely nothing to do with me. I pushed my blood pressure sky-high creating and revising training protocols to a deadline for a new Degree course, until I'd got them to a suitable standard to be accepted by the University for accreditation purposes. I then watched as someone else got their face on the front page of our organisation's website in recognition of all that hard work.    
    More recently, I've worked out that over the years my organisation has spent north of eight grand sending me on courses and training programmes. I have ended up with eleven letters after my name and am now the most qualified gibbon in my particular section of the zoo, and yet I'm a good twelve grand adrift of the people above me with the desk jobs and the funny handshakes.   
    Very soon, there will be a whole group of new people that will require training on the back of the work I helped put together last year and no doubt the management will be looking to the small handful of people with training qualifications to train them. I have a training qualification. At least I did. It's currently in eight pieces in an envelope addressed to the person who will, any day now, be asking me to get involved in training again.
     I may not have the handshake, but I'm more than capable of giving them the finger.

Regular readers know how much I love a good survey. There's something endlessly fascinating about looking at all those pie-charts illustrating what people think. The only thing that spoils these results for me is the tiny slice of the pie - and it's usually 8% or so - that is always reserved for the 'Don't Know' brigade. Whatever the subject of the survey, however serious the question, there will always be a section of the demographic who can be relied upon to be so fucking stupid that they simply can't fire up enough synapses to form an opinion. (Only slightly less annoying are the ones who consistantly tick the 'other' box - you know; the sort of smug, self-satisfied tossers who put their religion down as 'Jedi' in the last census because they thought it made them look subversive, the twats.) Usually, the question will be something like 'How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow?', and I guess you can sort of excuse a vague, non-committal response to that one given that you never know what juicy political revelations might pop up between now and 2009. (There might be another war to consider, or a change of Prime Minister, or a straight Lib-Dem candidate or something.) However, what I do find inexcusable is when the question boils down to a straightforward choice of two options, such as 'Do you prefer tea or coffee?' How can you possibly be so vacant as to come out with a 'Don't Know' for that? It makes you wonder just who these idiots are. In my head I'm absolutely convinced these are always the same people being interviewed in these surveys. Like a daytime television audience, I reckon there are a hardcore bunch of thirty or forty people who go around every large shopping mall simply to collar the poor survey-takers and inflict their lazy, half-arsed responses on them. I'd love to be there at the next one and add a question of my own to anyone found constantly giving out the 'Don't Knows' and it would be something along the lines of: 'I've got a four foot long Fireman's axe behind my back. Would you like a bloody good whack with it?' Obviously, in the interests of fair play, I'd have to point out to them that a 'Don't Know' would be construed as an affirmative response. Eventually.

Scenes of intense anger this week as livid Muslims took to the streets of London carrying placards with slogans like 'Behead those who insult Islam' and 'Europe you will pay - your 9/11 will come'. Some of these protestors were dressed as suicide bombers. One had dressed his small child in a hat bearing the legend 'I Love Al-Qaeda'. The reason for such a vitriolic outpouring af anti-Western feeling (ironically, by people living here and enjoying all the work-free benefits of Western society) was due to a cartoon run in a Danish newspaper which pictured the prophet Mohammed; something which is forbidden in Islam. The cartoon was run in several countries across Europe with similar reactions in other cities. Typically, none of the protestors were arrested, although one wag who thoughtfully brought along a handful of the offensive cartoons to hand out to the crowd was quickly whisked away. Apart from that, the police contented themselves with standing around and watching quietly, just as they did when Abu Hamza was calling for the death of every non-Muslim outside Finsbury Park mosque not so long back. (There are obviously different definitions of 'incitement' and 'racial hatred' depending on whether or not you're a follower of Islam, but I digress.)
  What this disturbing series of incidents has brought home to me is that there doesn't appear to be much of a market for the Islamic sit-com I was toying with. There I was, all set to follow the crazy antics of Imam Tehd and his dopey sidekick, Imam Dhugal as they got up to all sorts of comic capers in their mosque, (such as trying to win a place on the 'Shouts Of Praise' programme or kicking Ayatollah Brenahn up the arse) when these events kind of took the wind out of the whole project. OK, I knew that the hardline fundamentalists probably wouldn't think too much of my idea, but that's cool, I thought, the law-abiding 'mainstream majority' of Muslims - the ones we keep being told are against these acts of anti-Western dissent - might be up for a bit of comic relief. Then I remembered that it was the 'mainstream majority' that voted Hamas into power in Palestine last month on their 'lets wipe Israel off the face of the planet' ticket. So, unfortunately, my hopes of creating a groundbreaking new niche in comedy were dashed. Sorry, Tehd. I don't think the market's quite there at the moment. Maybe in a thousand years or so when screaming fanaticism has been replaced with serene introspection in this comparatively new religion. I mean, it took quite a while for the Christians to calm down, didn't it? After all, those wacky Puritans were still burning midwives at the stake only a handful of centuries back simply because they they knew a bit about herbs and so therefore must've been witches in league with Lucifer. Fair play, though. I often feel the urge to set fire to the odd vegetarian myself once in a while...

Did anyone see the New Year in by watching the celebrations on the telly live from London? It was absolutely amazing. Twenty minutes of the most intense non-stop visual and aural barrage I've ever seen. It was even better with our living-room window open, as we're near enough to the Thames to hear the explosions. The whole thing centred around the London Eye, with all the rockets and sky-displays launching from the ground around it and even from the wheel itself. There was a full laser and strobe lightshow, and even several specially-rigged barges full of pyrotechnics dotted along the river to maximise the effect. Awesome. So where was all this at Millennium when some silly bastard dragged his flu-ridden carcass up to Trafalgar Square to witness the 'once in a lifetime' show promised by Tony Bliar? Remember the 'River of Fire' we were promised? I don't and I was there looking at it. There certainly seemed to be some sort of river of fire thing going on last night, though. At one point, the display was so intense that the white-balance on the outside broadcast cameras went tits-up. I though they'd dropped the bomb for one moment. Yes, last night's celebrations were truly spectacular and fully deserved the months of hype. Unfortunately, the months of hype were all in Late 1999 and pillocks like me believed them. If only they'd said 'It'll be great! Just come back in five years and you'll see what we mean!'. It would've saved me a six mile walk home at two in the morning back then, too. Where was Ken Livingstone and his extra three hundred buses in '99, eh? Git.

One hundred and eighty-six applicants out of around eight hundred were rejected for the latest recruitment drive for Police Officers by Avon and Somerset Police because of their sex and the colour of their skin. They were male and white. These otherwise perfectly acceptable candidates were automatically paper-sifted because Avon and Somerset Police was already 'over-represented by white men'. Andy Palfreman, the Chairman of A&S Police Federation slammed the move by saying 'It's not lawful under sex or race discrimination Acts.' Batook Pandya, the director of Support Against Racist Incidents added 'People should be selected on their skills, not the colour of their skin.' Very true. Unfortunately, the Human Resources 'managers' at this (and certain other) Constabularies don't see it that way.
  In their heads, all minorities must be proportionally included in the make-up of their organisations, which means that if they have the choice between a five foot tall black lesbian and an ex-Marine to choose from to fight crime in their particular metropolis, then guess who gets the job? Now while I think the idea of a diverse make-up in any organisation is right and laudable, this is not the way to go about it. You don't reject people because they don't tick the boxes you're looking for; what you do is actively campaign and recruit within those areas and raise the profile of the job until you get the people you want coming forward. If they still don't want to join then accept it and move on, otherwise you end up bending over backwards and re-writing the criteria until the particular minority of your choice becomes the ideal candidate. 'Positive Discrimination', I believe it's called.
  A similar thing has been mooted recently by Education Authority bigwigs here in London, who are concerned that young black males are not doing as well in their educations as young white males. They suggest that the problem might be solved by teaching these kids in an all-black environment with black teachers. These specially segregated classes will, they say, rectify the lack of progress and encourage the kids to excel. It sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Having black children taught by black teachers to give them a better chance? Trouble is, you swap the word 'black' for 'white' in that last statement and what you have is a little thing known in South Africa as 'apartheid', and we all saw what a resounding success that was, didn't we?

The Government is proposing to introduce a National Curriculum for toddlers which aims to dictate how infants learn ‘communication, language and literacy.’ It will, predictably, create lots of jobs for otherwise unemployable Guardian readers and cost billions to implement. The Department for Education is keen that all young children learn ‘personal and social development together with a knowledge and understanding of the world’. Which, in a nutshell, boils down to ‘piss off back to work, Mum, while the state brainwashes your kids and turns them into obedient little Socialist robots.’ Can you just imagine the kind of thing a pre-school moppet will pick up if this insane idea gets off the ground? A healthy contempt for Britain and British history is undoubtedly a given, probably followed by a load of pro-European rhetoric and a comprehensive grounding in Islam by the age of four. The mind boggles. I know I shouldn’t get too concerned, seeing as a fair percentage of today’s school leavers can’t even spell their own names after eight years of New Labour education, it’s just that I seem to recall a similar scheme being adopted in Europe not so long ago. Germany went through it’s own phase of instilling state-approved ideals and values in it’s children from an early age to ensure they were educated ‘physically, intellectually and morally in the spirit of National Socialism.’ They called it ‘Hitlerjugend’. We called it the Hitler Youth…

'E' is for England: I'm an Englishman. Both my parents? English. I was born in Shropshire (right in the middle of England), which makes me about as English as it's possible to be. I like being English in the same way I like being a Wolves fan. It's because, as things stand right now, both of these labels denote an underdog. I have trouble coming to terms with the British Government frowning on me for wanting to be English, as if I, as an ordinary working man, should personally shoulder the blame for hundreds of years of Colonialism when it was the British Government of the day that made all its money on the back of slavery and exploitation, not English working men like myself. People like me were the ones coughing our lungs up at the age of twenty during the Industrial Revolution. People like me were the ones shot to bloody ribbons at Passchendaele. The ruling classes tended to be sat around making idiotic decisions and getting richer by the day. No change there, then.
    So it tends to get on my tits each April as St. George's Day approaches and I look round and wonder where all the red and white flags are. It's not as if people need much encouragement to wave a flag and have a beer; just look back a month at St. Patrick's Day. Most of London was wearing green and wobbling about with a Guinness in hand, yet on the 23rd of April in England's Capital city things are always quiet. It's because we have been successfully convinced that a bit of national pride once a year is tantamount to Fascism: that the only people who would want to wave a red-and-white flag are skinhead thugs; racists and queer-bashers. You can't be English anymore as we're all one big happy nation. You're British, don't you know. Except, if that's the case, how come there's a Scottish Assembly to decide Scottish matters and a Welsh assembly for the Welsh. Where's the English one, then? At Westminster, only it's not English, it's British; weren't you listening?
    There's also another connotation of the red cross on the white background. It's the symbol of the Crusader, so not only are you a jingoistic Nazi and a racist for wanting to display it, you're also an Islamophobe. And you hate women. And you touch up children. And you eat meat/smoke/drink yada yada yada. How many years have we fallen for this now? How long will we continue to swallow this shit before we say 'enough'? Take a look at who's currently running the show (though thank God, not for much longer!) The Prime Minister? Scottish. The Chancellor? Scottish. Huge swathes of money are sent to Scotland year after year so that Scottish students get free higher education and Scottish pensioners get treatment denied English ones. So that's a 'United' Kingdom, is it? Bollocks! The brilliant thing is that the Scots are willingly moving towards devolution, meaning they'll eventually go back to being their own country and we'll no longer have to pay for them. As an added bonus, all the Scottish MPs currently filling their snouts at Westminster will be booted out too. Marvellous.
    However, that's a dream for the future. Right now, it's about time we, the ordinary English, took back the Cross of St. George. Took it back from those who profane it with racism and violence. Took it back from those who would use it to paint us all as Fascists and bullies. Took it back and used it for what it is. A symbol of national pride to be celebrated once a year. We're not better than the Scots or Welsh or Irish, merely separate in the same way that they are. It's time we were allowed, nay, encouraged, to celebrate this difference; this 'diversity'. Otherwise...well, G.K. Chesterton may eventually turn out to be more prophet than poet...

Motorcycle deaths are down to their lowest levels in seven years. ROSPA; the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents says this is due to traffic calming measures such as speed bumps and the increase in Gatso cameras. Bollocks. The reason that deaths are down is twofold. Firstly, motorcyclists are much better trained these days and those who do finally get their hands on a licence are far safer road users than most pillocks on four wheels, and secondly, because the anti-biking Nazis who run this country have made the actual process of getting said licence so bloody hard with the two part test and initial b.h.p. limits, more and more seventeen year olds each year simply can't be bothered.
  The main killer of motorcyclists is, and always has been, the inattentive and unobservant wanker in the car and the sole reason that motorcycling deaths are down is that there a fewer motorcyclists than there were seven years ago. Soon, it will be by far and away the safest form of road transport because ther'll be no bikers left. When this happens, I've no doubt ROSPA will view it as a resounding success for their road safety campaigns. Twats.

It's October 21st 2005 - 'Trafalgar Day'. Two hundred years ago today, Admiral Lord Nelson led the British fleet to an overwhelming victory over the combined French and Spanish ships. By the end of the day, there were around 1,500 of our brave sailors killed or wounded. There were over 17,000 of the same on the other side. The victory cost Nelson his life, but it ensured the naval supremacy of this country for well over a century. No Nelson, no Empire. He was that important to our history. So how is the great man's achievement being honoured today? With an hour-long programme at teatime on BBC2 showing a commemoration ceremony live from Plymouth. No biography, no story of his colourful and scandalous love-life, no step-by-step explanation of the apparently suicidal way in which this tactical genius split his fleet in two and went straight at the enemy broadside before finally getting in among them, splitting their line into three and pounding them into kindling. No. One lousy hour of fireworks and maybe a ship or two, and why? Because, yet again, the powers that be would rather ignore this country's past than risk offending anybody by celebrating it. Perish the thought that we British should have a bit of national pride for a day. You won the Ashes, that's enough flag-waving for one year. We're a 'multi-cultural' society now and nobody wants to see your Union Jack, you nasty racist. Go away, it's nearly time for the Diwali celebrations. To be honest, I'm amazed that the BBC hasn't dropped that first 'B' in favour of an 'S' for 'State' yet, but I suppose it's only a matter of time. The least they could've done here in London was to throw a street party at Greenwich or give Nelson's Column a bit of a revamp. Instead, Ken Livingstone has placed a statue of a pregnant, armless woman on one of the plinths 'to celebrate disability'. If these Socialist wankers really want to venerate a disabled hero, I suggest they cast their eyes upward at the one-armed fellow with the eye-patch at the top of the column. The poor bastard must be looking down with his one good eye and wondering why he ever bothered...

Another month, another Hollywood remake. In 2006, we're to be treated to yet another version of Superman, this time with X-Men director Bryan Singer at the helm. I've just seen the pictures of the bright young things cast as Lois and Clark and I can't say I'm impressed. Brandon Routh, the guy playing geeky Clark, is all dark and smouldering; pouting away like a Calvin Klein model and Kate Bosworth (Lois) is about eighteen and blonde, which is excellent casting for a world-weary thirty year old chain-smoking cynic, don't you think? It looks as if they were aiming for something that would feel like a big-screen version of 'Smallville', in which case why didn't they just make a big screen version of 'Smallville' and be done with it? Bryan Singer is a gifted director who can get under the skin of his characters and display their weaknesses and humanity in a way that makes the audience genuinely care about what happens to them. Look at the way Nightcrawler was presented in 'X2', or how the death of Jean Grey was handled.
  And therein lies my problem with Superman.
  Superman isn't human. He has no weaknesses. He is pretty much invulnerable and can do anything, even fly. Where's the scope for human drama in that? Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder gave it a pretty good go back in the Seventies, then in the Nineties we had Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher and a few years ago, up popped 'Smallville'. Superman has been done, and done to death. He is a one-dimensional cartoon character and there is just no way anyone in this day and age will find any resonance with him, which is why I'm convinced this film will tank at the box-office. I hope it does, given that its budget has been estimated at $250 million. Maybe then Hollywood will stop all this 'remake' bollocks and look around for some fresh new ideas. Meanwhile, everyone can look forward to 'The Wicker Man', 'The Fog' and 'The Creature From The Black Lagoon' before that happens...

I've decided to stop buying newspapers. I mean, what's the bloody point? It's the same every day and I for one have had enough of shelling out a fiver a week to read about it. Another dead soldier in Iraq, gun-crime running rampant on Britain's streets (but only within the young black 'community', although you can't actually say that in case you're shouted down as a racist), global warming, rising house prices, uncontrolled immigration, yada yada yada. It's like Groundhog Day for me every morning when I get on the bus. I swear I've been reading the same bloody paper day-in, day-out since 2001. So I've made a decision. Save the wedge and have an extra half-hour's nap on the 133 every morning and use the cash to buy an extra bottle of wine every week. Ok, so I'm going to miss staring at Keeley Hazell's tits, but on the upside, I'll never have to look at Moss, Docherty, Jordan, Posh and all the other vacuous tossers that are apparently necessary to shift copies. All this and I get to do my bit at improving 'Thresher's' stock-control, too. Aces!

Ok, I'm slowly coming around to the idea that hands-free communication is a good idea in this busy twenty-first century world of ours, but I still have to do a double-take everytime I find myself next to somebody with one of those 'Bluetooth' headsets. It's not so much the fact that they have a piece of silver plastic in their ear with a flashing light on it, (if you really have to demonstrate your love of 'Star Trek' by impersonating Lt. Uhuru, then be my guest) but is it absolutely necessary to gesticulate wildly whenever you talk in public?
  You might think that standing in a bus-queue and talking in a raised voice whilst windmilling your arms and conducting what to the casual observer seems to be a one-way conversation with God gives you a 'switched-on man-about-town with the latest technology' kind of vibe. It doesn't. Two things are going through everybody's mind. An initial thought of 'nutter' which is then swiftly replaced (upon spotting the earpiece) by a final, dismissive one of 'twat'.

The following was posted in a national Australian newspaper out of Sydney. One day, in an ideal world, we'll see the same common-sense perspective applied to our own once-great nation. Obviously not while the current Government is in power, though...

   IMMIGRANTS, NOT AUSTRALIANS MUST ADAPT.

 'Take It or Leave It'  - I am tired of this nation worrying about whether we are offending some individual or their culture. Since the terrorist attacks on Bali, we have experienced a surge in patriotism by the majority of Australians. However, the dust from the attacks had barely settled when the "politically correct" crowd began complaining about the possibility that our patriotism was offending others. I am not against immigration, nor do I hold a grudge against anyone who is seeking a better life by coming to Australia. However, there are a few things that those who have recently come to our country, and apparently some born here, need to understand. This idea of Australia being a 'multicultural' community has served only to dilute our sovereignty and our national identity. As Australians, we have our own culture, our own society, our own language and our own lifestyle. This culture has been developed over two centuries of struggles, trials and victories by millions of men and women who have sought freedom. We speak ENGLISH, not Spanish, Lebanese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to become part of our society, learn the language! "In God We Trust" is our National Motto. This is not some Christian, right wing, political slogan. We adopted this motto because Christian men and women, on Christian principles, founded this nation, and this is clearly documented. It is certainly appropriate to display it on the walls of our schools. If God offends you, then I suggest you consider another part of the world as your new home, because God is part of our culture. If the Southern Cross offends you, or you don't like "A Fair Go", then you should seriously consider a move to another part of this planet. We are happy with our culture and have no desire to change, and we really don't care how you did things where you came from. This is OUR COUNTRY, OUR LAND, and OUR LIFESTYLE, and we will allow you every opportunity to enjoy all this, but once you are done complaining, whining, and griping about Our Flag, Our Pledge, Our National Motto, or Our Way of Life,  I highly encourage you take advantage of one other great Australian freedom, "THE RIGHT TO F**K OFF".

   Australians. God bless 'em! If only my family and I could afford to emigrate to this wonderful country, we'd be off like a bloody shot. South London ain't too hot anymore, know what I mean? Don't get me wrong, it's still a nice area of the country to live in, just as it was in the Fifties, it's just that, what with me not having Somalian as my first language, I tend to feel a little out of the loop living around here these days...

'P' is for Politics: Politics is where all the gobby fucks you couldn't stand when you were at university eventually end up. There is something in certain people's genetic make-up which encourages them to think they know what's best for everyone else and that they must passionately strive to inflict their vision on the rest of us for the greater good. There is also something in other people's genetic make-up which encourages them to listen to the voices telling them to kill you and eat your sweetbreads. One of these groups of people we refer to as 'politicians', the other 'serial-killers'. On the whole, I'd trust the latter more.
   Politics in Britain is a terribly complicated business, but it basically all boils down to the Left and the Right. The Left believe that everyone should be equal (apart from the politicians on the Left themselves, that is) and that everyone is entitled to a bit of the pie, even if they didn't contribute to any of the ingredients in the first place. Vote for them and they'll tell you what to do to make everyone equal. The Right believe that if you don't get off your arse and work hard for a living, you have the right to starve (unless your ancestors had a stately home and were fabulously wealthy from all the money created for them by people doing exactly that - working hard and starving.) Vote for them and they'll tell you what to do to make everyone rich and prosperous. There's a third party in British politics too, but I couldn't tell you what they believe in because they don't know themselves.
   Me, I'm a Libertarian, which means I believe they can all go and fuck off because only I know what's best for me and don't trust anyone to tell me otherwise, least of all some ex student activist/public school knob-end. I believe in the concept of 'do as you please' rather than 'do as you're told', and that the role of Government is to be small, discrete and to stay the fuck out of my life. It certainly shouldn't exist to spend my money on adverts telling me to drink less, exercise more and eat vegetables. These political beliefs mean that I always vote tactically, which usually means finding out who is in control and voting for whoever is most likely to beat them. I feel this sort of approach should be encouraged, as unemployment every five years might sharpen the minds of some of the gits purported to be acting in our best interests. That, or regular armed insurrection...

I've just noticed how quiet I've been on the whole Rant thing lately, could this possibly be that I'm mellowing in my dotage and am no longer capable of getting wound up over things? Don't you believe it! Today, I've been reading about the latest Government plans to fuck the motorist over for a few more quid. Transport Secretary Alistair Darling (you know him; the one with the white hair and black eyebrows. A bit like Steve Martin, but funnier) is thinking about charging you £1.34 a mile if you travel in peak times, but 'significantly' reducing the price of petrol to compensate. So far, nobody in the Opposition parties seems to have worked the maths out and noticed that if an average family car does 40 mpg, then even if they made the petrol free, you''d still be shelling out fifty-odd quid a gallon in real terms, which is precisely the argument they'd need to shoot this prick down with. Just another craft trick by a Scottish cabinet minister to screw the English; a bit like Gordon Brown stealing everone's pension and hoping they won't notice him borrowing nine billion a month to plug all the holes. Do you have any idea just how much nine billion is? If someone gave you a quid every second from now on, it'd take thirty-two years to reach nine billion and that fat knacker is running this country into debt for this much every month! Less than eight weeks since the General Election and these clowns are already lining up some truly world-class ideas, aren't they? Just imaging what treats we can all look forward to over the next four years...

I genuinely, sincerely cannot understand Gordon Brown. Not because he's a mumbling Scotchman, but because of his total and utter reluctance to actually do anything. The man has spent a whole decade - over a quarter of his life - mumbling and grumbling that his smarmy jug-eared mate really ought to move aside like he promised, and then when he finally gets what he wants, he simply sits there like a rabbit in the headlights watching everything unravel around him. Bizarre.
   I had a mate like this. Every day after school we'd dash off to the chip shop to watch the big boys playing 'Defender' and 'Scramble' - the 10p-powered PlayStations of their day. Bless him, he'd jump up and down, breathlessly chanting 'Can I have a go? Can I have a go?' until finally, after being brow-beaten into submission, one of the big boys took pity on him and let him take the controls; at which point he'd stare transfixed at the screen, totally unwilling to press any buttons until, three seconds later, the aliens got him and the big boy took the game back.
  This is Brown right now. The man has the final say on everything that happens in this country for the next eighteen months at least. He has the keys to the castle. He is master of all he surveys. He could build a legacy that would echo into history in this time. Take us out of Europe, ban the bomb, scrap the absurd Human Rights act, bring back hanging - anything. Instead, there he stands, unblinking and impotent, waiting for the Martians (or in this case, the Tories) to put him out of his (and our) misery. Utterly baffling.
  At least when it all went tits-up for Nero, he got the violin out and knocked out a tune. This bloke is too paralysed even for that.

Well, the local elections are over, the results are in, and it's abundantly clear that Nu-Labour has been given an almighty fisting by the electorate. The figures make grim reading (if you're a Socialist that is. Personally, I'm laughing my tits off). Gordon and his cronies were beaten into third place, taking just 24 per cent of the vote.The Conservatives got 44 per cent and the Liberal Democrats 25 per cent. This translates as an extra 1,474 seats for the Tories (an increase of 260), while the Lib Dems picked up another 34 (taking their total to 813). Labour, on the other hand, lost 333 seats and are now down to 1,019 which, if repeated in a General Election, would see a Conservative majority of 134.
   Now please don't think I'm sitting here gloating about a glorious Conservative future because I'm not. As far as I can see, the Tories have yet to set out exactly what they stand for and the Blair-lite clown leading them at the moment still hasn't said anything to convince me he's the boy to vote for come 2010. No, what this election came down to, first and foremost, was a chance for us all to show our unelected, promise-breaking 'Prime Minister' exactly what we thought of him, and boy, did we. Typically, Gordon popped up on Andrew Marr's programme to say how he would listen to our concerns from now on. Ah, so we'll now have that referrendum on Europe, will we, big man? Don't hold your breath. No, Gordon won't listen for one minute, because in his head, he is one hundred per cent right in everything he does and we are all simply too stupid to see it. Great! This means he'll carry on exactly as he has been and will be unemployed within two years. Marvellous. Wouldn't want to think he'd learn from his mistakes, would we?
   One person who is learing from his mistakes (and the mistakes of his predecessor) appears to be Boris Johnson, who has just announced that he's added Bill Brattan to the Mayoral pay-roll. Brattan is an ex-Commissioner of the NYPD and the man responsible for instigating the 'ComStat' crime targetting approach (look it up) approach of zero-tolerance, division based policing which dropped New York's crime figures through the floor and kept them there. Amusingly, one of the first things Boris did was to call a meeting with the Head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair (I can't call him a 'Commissioner', that's a title I reserve for real policemen.) Don't be surprised if there's another Nu-Labour crony picking up his P45 in the next few weeks.
  Go Boris!

For the benefit of a certain Mr. Gates; can you please stop pre-setting your word processing products to what you laughably refer to as 'American English'. There's no such thing as American English; there is 'English' and there is 'Bad Spelling'. The only word you Americans spell correctly in its original form is 'Aluminum', but this is small recompense for your consistent juvenile mangling of 'Color', 'Odor', 'Rumor' and virtually everything else that should have a 'u' in it.
  Written English has been evolving on this fair island for the last eighteen hundred years or so. Your version was brought over by a bunch of barely-literate religious oddballs on the Mayflower, yet you have the audacity to refer to it as if it were a seperate and distinct language instead of merely being the result of poor education passed down over the last few centuries. Wind your necks in and write correctly, you insolent tossers! And since I've already mentioned you at the beginning, Bill, here's another thought for you. Your corporate biography paints you as a God-fearing Christian. If that's the case, then how, as a  'rich man', do you square the parable of the camel and the eye of the needle with the fact that you personally own more in assets that the twenty poorest nations on this planet?
  Can you spell 'hypocrite'? Oh wait, you're American - you probably can't.

Another tale of life in the splendid world of the professional photographer... After years of breathing in chemical fumes in our darkroom at work due to the architect placing it in the middle of the building to create a 'light-trap' (which is great for being able to turn the lights off effectively, but not so good for finding an exterior wall to fix an air-conditioning outlet onto), the contractors (read: 'lowest bidders') have finally chosen this week to commence replacing all the old air-conditioning units in the place. If only they hadn't waited until it was minus one outside to completely knock out every temperature control in the entire building for a fortnight, thus rendering it an illegal working environment under Regulations Six and Seven (Ventilation and Temperature respectively) of the Workplace Regulations 1992 (guess who's a qualified Health and Safety Rep, then?), things might not have been too bad. As it was, well...have you ever tried signing paperwork while wearing gloves? Not an ideal situation and one that was beginning to get us all down, and so it came as quite a pleasant little surprise when, halfway through the day, we finally took delivery of the chilled water dispensers we'd ordered last summer when it was hitting thirty-two degrees in the aforementioned area. Never let it be said that management never listen to their staff, it's just that their hearing appears to work on a more 'geological' timescale than ours. And talking of management; there's still no sign of the new boss a full four weeks after his successful appointment as the head of our department. That'll be another 'mushroom', then.

I've spouted off against industry fat cats earning huge sums for doing bugger-all before, but the comments made by England Coach and lover of all things saggy and Swedish, Sven Goran Eriksson, beggar belief. After just being awarded £5 million a year for the next four years to carry on his duties as the national boss, he turns round and warns the fans not to expect glory in the European Championships. Apparently, the highest paid coach in international football is 'amazed' that English fans have such high expectations. 'They have only ever won once and that was forty years ago', he observed. He went on to insist that the team are 'not among the favourites' and has already prepared an excuse ('player burn-out') for the inevitable disappointing performance. Well, fucking hell! The FA are paying twenty million quid to hear that we're crap and Sven can't do anything about it. They could've saved a fortune by giving me the job. For a tenth of that, I would've explained in much greater depth about how shite we are and could even have been trusted to keep my knob out of Ulrika Jonsson while doing so. 

'L' is for Lager: There was a wonderful episode of 'Men Behaving Badly' where Les the landlord laid on a selection of European beers to see what the lads made of them. Cue much merriment as Gary and Tony imbibed copious amounts of 'Binky', 'Plop' and 'Sod'. Well, I may not be as worldly-wise as those two, but my local offy has a sterling selection of Polish beverages, and I'm having a right good go at working my way through them whenever the football's on. It all started off with the fairly innocuous 'Lech' at 5.2% and then slowly morphed into the lovely 'Tyskie' at 5.6%. Then came the frankly unpronounceable 'Zywiec' at 5.7%, before all bets were called off as I discovered 'Zubr' at 6% and 'Warka' at 7%. Now I'm at the stage - Real Ale boy as I am - where I will occasionally fancy an ice-cold lager and for once won't have to worry about feeling guilty and compromising my alcoholic integrity by ordering a 'Budweiser' or a 'Carling', because I now know that there are some real, top notch brews out there, courtesy of our friends from the other side of the old Iron Curtain. God Bless Poland!

Apparently, we have a new boss at work, the seventh in the fifteen years that I've been there. Now apart from the one boss who had actually come up through the ranks from the shop-floor and therefore knew everything about the job and was bloody good at it, all the others have either been 'mushrooms' or 'seagulls'.
  The mushroom bosses stayed hidden in their office happily smothered by a warm blanket of bullshit of their own making, while the seagulls were the ones who flew in out of nowhere squawking loudly before crapping over everything and pissing off again.
  I have yet to form an opinion on this new fella, except to say that in terms of getting my job done, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever whose arse is sitting in the big chair. The people who use our services (I won't call them 'clients' because unlike some in our organisation, I'm not impressed by late-Eighties corporate American buzz-words) tend to contact us directly and book their jobs in over the phone. We then go out and deal with them of our own volition. It's referred to in business as 'self-tasking' and it enables a motivated team of professionals to get on with things efficiently and, in turn, make their boss look good without any input or interference from him whatsoever.
  This works so well that one of the previous bosses never even bothered to find out what we actually did ('you lot use lasers, don't you?') and only ever came into our office to leave a tin of biscuits at Christmas. In fact, now I come to think about it, the whole management team could disappear overnight and the work would still get done, probably quicker, too, as there'd be no pointless e-mails to read or meetings to attend.)
  Then again, there'd be no bugger left to sign the overtime that we're obliged to work due to us being understaffed, either, so I think we'll leave these guys in place for now. Just until the revolution, you understand...

Sometimes, it's all I can do not to scream. In place of  a traditional fifth of November bonfire, Ilfracombe Rugby Club, down in deepest Devon, will be having this. It's a 16' by 12' video screen showing an image of a real, heartily burning bonfire complete with a speaker system so that the roar and crackle of the flames can be 'enjoyed'. The club has held this 'non-fire' night for the past four years, as Health and Safety legislation meant a real bonfire 'was not financially viable.' In order to further add to the ambience, any revellers stupid enough to actually turn up will be warmed by giant heaters. Jesus.
  Paul Crabb, the club president, said they came up with the idea because qualified fire marshals and barricades needed to keep people at a safe distance from a real fire would've cost far too much. This virtual option works out at a mere three hundred notes, and is therefore a far more attractive proposition - on paper at least. The event, which has run for the past five years, is expected to attract in the region of 2,000 visitors. They're obviously strapped for entertainment in Devon, and I've no doubt a big telly with a fire on it proves a far superior form of pastime than the traditional ones of throwing stones at the moon or drinking cider until you fall over.
  Speaking of alcohol, when asked where the idea came from, Paul said "It was lager, probably. We were all sat round the table discussing the pros and cons of having a bonfire, the idea of a virtual fire was thrown into the discussion and everyone thought it was a great idea." Everyone in Devon thinks that Joss Stone is a great idea, but I'll let that one pass.
  The worrying thing here is that, although this event has become something of a quirky local legend, given half a chance, the HSE would be more than happy to see it rolled out everywhere. Virtual fires don't burn people, do they? This obviously means they're safer. I, for one, cannot ever recall anyone other than Edward Woodward being burned in a communal bonfire. Normal people usually notice how warm it gets if they stand too close and tend to move back a bit, but there you go.
  Sadly, it is becoming apparent that our traditional Bonfire Night seems to be slowly dying out in favour of the crass commercialisation of the week beforehand. Retail Week reported that UK sales of Hallowe'en-related products hit the £235 million mark last year, a huge increase from the £12m spent on them in 2001, while firework sales are down 40% on this time last year. Depressing, isn't it?
  Still at least all those happy West Country yokels will be as safe as safe can be, milling about in front of their giant televised psuedo-conflagration. Let's hope the fucking thing doesn't fall on any of them, shall we?
  What a crying shame that would be...

Now that the festive season is almost upon us, anyone watching the telly at teatime is going to get pounded into submission by all the toy adverts. This in itself is worthy of a rant, but what has really caused me to comment this time is an advert that has just been on for Scalextric. In a sequence full of flash-cuts and aggressive music, a couple of fantastically detailed racing cars scream around a huge track past trees, grandstands full of spectators and under bridges and lap-counters. A pair of lads watch with animated faces as they control their cars with fingertip-precision; roaring them on for lap after lap around the bends and curves of their massive track. This is pretty much the same way that the makers of Scalextric flogged it back in the Seventies, too. It was a load of lying bollocks then and it is now. Have you any idea how much it would cost to knock up a playset like those kids have? And there's simply no way you could lay that much track down - the amount of power you'd have to shove through it to get the cars moving would melt your carpet. It's a bleeding rip-off, just like it was twenty-five years ago when I got a set for Christmas and wondered why I was left staring at a three-foot long loop of disappointment on which two tiny pastic lumps accelerated insanely into the first bend before flinging themselves off the track and into the fireplace. Bridges? Pit-crews? 'Taters! It'd cost you half a year's wages to build the one you saw on the advert and it'd still take you all of three minutes to realise what a pile of over-rated wank the whole thing was. So there you have it, folks, Scalextric - the perfect metaphor for the sport it represents. Just like Formula One, it's overhyped, overmarketed, far too expensive and you'll have lost interest in it by the first bend. Avoid.

Hot on the heels of Tony Blair promising to 'match' the British public's generosity in raising £100 million for the victims of the tsunami with tax-payer's money comes Gordon Brown's magnanimous gesture in offering to pay 10% of Mozambique's debts to other countries. This should also be around the £100 million mark and is on top of the fact that he's wiping £100 million off their debt to the UK anyway. While I agree that the latter is a fine gesture to a struggling nation, the first two actions merely show the utter contempt that this Government has for clowns like me who were stupid enough to vote for them last time. So £200 million of YOUR cash will soon be on its way to countries like France and Germany on Mozambique's behalf; money that could be used to employ more nurses to stem the flow of people dropping dead from MRSA in our filthy hospitals or maybe a few more policemen to combat the fact that gun-crime has doubled since New Labour came to power. Perhaps if that jug-eared twat and his fat Scottish side-kick spent a bit more time in this country doing the job that they were actually elected to do instead of giving handouts on the global stage, they might see just exactly what we as a nation have to show for eight years of pseudo-Socialist soundbites. Sod-all.

I've spouted off against industry fat cats earning huge sums for doing bugger-all before, but the comments made by England Coach and lover of all things saggy and Swedish, Sven Goran Eriksson, beggars belief.
  After just being awarded £5 million a year for the next four years to carry on his duties as the national boss, he turns round and warns the fans not to expect glory in the European Championships. Apparently, the highest paid coach in international football is 'amazed' that English fans have such high expectations. 'They have only ever won once and that was forty years ago', he observed. He went on to insist that the team are 'not among the favourites' and has already prepared an excuse ('player burn-out') for the inevitable disappointing performance.
  Well, fucking hell! The FA are paying twenty million quid to hear that we're crap and Sven can't do anything about it? They could've saved a fortune by giving me the job. For a tenth of that, I would've explained in much greater depth about how shite we are and could even have been trusted to keep my knob out of Ulrika Jonsson while doing so. 

So I'm scoping out the January Sales looking for a bargain in WHSmith and what do I see? One of those 'Z'-list celebrity fitness DVDs being offloaded for the bargain price of £5.99. Nothing wrong with that, you might think. Bit of a bargain there, Fish. Best you get one in and work off those Christmas pounds, you fat nosher. Well, that's all very well until I tell you that the 'celebrity' in question was none other than Jade Goody - the council estate swamp-donkey from 'Big Brother' a couple of series back. I had a look at the box just to see if she'd suddenly become a svelte sex-goddess due to some miracle training regime, but no, it was the same chubby shunter I remembered from last year's tabloids. Now you've got to admire her agent for securing her a gig like that, but who the hell do they think is going to buy it? 'You too can have a figure like Jade Goody!' is hardly going to incite anyone to part with their wedge, is it? Save on your electricity bill and spend the six quid down the pie shop. 

There was a programme on the other night about pandas. Now, I hate pandas. The nasty, fluffy black and white little bastards. They're not even proper bears, for fuck's sake! They're just jumped-up marsupials who're playing out of their league like those little spaced-out koala twats. And their refusal to abandon that 1979 Siouxsie Sioux look is getting right on my tits, too.
  This programme informed us that the Giant Panda only eats bamboo and has to munch it's way through pound after pound of the stuff to stay alive. Nutritionists have proven that bamboo has next to no vitamins or minerals and is almost pure fibre, which is why the stupid creatures have to eat the stuff for fourteen hours solid, leaving them so knackered that they sleep for the next ten before waking up and starting the whole routine again.
  Just to give you an idea of how mind-numbingly vacant these things are; if there is no bamboo around they will slowly starve themselves to death rather than tuck in to any of the other lush, green vegetation surrounding them. And this is the face of the World Wildlife Fund? No wonder they're an endangered species. Darwin proposed the notion of 'survival of the fittest' and quite right too.
  I say we chop down all the bamboo and consign the useless little wankers to history. They're too stupid to be allowed to pollute the planet with their prescence any longer. At least with a big stick we can get real bears to give us an entertaining dance...

Teenage 'Green Day' fans - when considering your next pair of combats, why not go for a pair where the crotch actually starts somewhere above your knees? That way, you might stand a chance of being able to ride that expensive, pristeen-wheeled skateboard you're carrying around (the one that Daddy bought) instead of having it perennially tucked under your fucking arm, you sad little twat...

Mediocre 'Twilight Zone' rip-off 'The X-Files' is released on DVD in a multi-disc extravaganza this month and to commemorate the 'event', one of the movie magazines ran an article about alien abductions. Funny, but have you noticed that all the people who claim to have had close encounters tend to be American? They usually follow the same pattern of some lone idiot driving along in a pick-up when all of a sudden a saucer lands and whisks him away in order to perform some bizarre experiments on him before dropping him off exactly where they found him.
  Yeah, right. I mean, have you ever studied basic astronomy? Even the nearest star to us is four light years away (which, for the hard-of-thinking among you means that a space-ship would have to travel at the speed of light for four years to get here.) Most astronomers seem to think that the nearest likely place for life is Sirius and that's a mind-boggling 8.7 light years away. Now, I don't know about you but if I was a member of an advanced alien civilisation, the last thing I'd want to do is spend the best part of a decade flying across the galaxy in order to examine some halfwit Redneck's anal cavity for an hour or two before sodding off again. At least I'd want to take the fucker with me to show the folks back home, wouldn't you?.
  Then again, these are Americans were talking about. No wonder they put the bastards back again. I imagine it's like when I used to catch frogs in a jam-jar as a kid.  Fun for a few minutes, but I soon got tired of it and went off to find something more interesting to do. Curiously though, I never felt the urge to interfere with Kermit's arse at all during his brief spell of captivity. Oh, those crazy extra-terrestrials...

Oh boy, there goes the blood-pressure again. Here we are in the run-up to Christmas and all the Left-wing wankers are positively falling over themselves to rename the 25th of December in case it offends the delicate sensitivities of any poor non-Christian out there.
 You all remember when the New Labour bell-ends at Birmingham City Council re-branded Christmas as 'Winterval' back in '96 (Birmingham's Bull-Ring owners have just banned Father Christmas, by the way. Anyone surprised?)  The latest tossers to jump on the 'I despise my own nationality' bandwagon are the arses who run Cornwall's top tourist attraction, The Eden Project, who have renamed Christmas as the 'Time of Gifts'. Given that the entire fucking site has taken it's name from the Christian Bible in the first place, you'd think that they'd have seen the irony in falling for such PC bollocks, wouldn't you? Still, what do you expect from a business consortium who charges gullible vegetarians £15 to visit the world's biggest garden centre?
  What makes me laugh - and what anyone with even the most perfunctory grasp of British history and comparitive religion will tell you - is that what we celebrate on December 25th is the old Saxon festival of Yule, the mid-winter feast, when everyone got so sick of the cold that they all slaughtered a few animals, cracked open the mead and had a party to relieve the boredom. The early Christians merely nicked the idea and subverted it in order to gain a few easy converts. (As for Father Christmas, the popularity of the whole 'fat, jolly bloke in the red suit' thing can be traced back to a rather successful marketing campaign by the Coca-Cola company back in 1931 that just kind of stuck.)
  Maybe if a few more Guardian readers were to read something other than their so-called newspaper, they'd realise that by ignoring 'Christmas', they were surpressing the right of worship of all the good, Odin-fearing Saxons out there. Religious oppression from your friendly neighbourhood Socialists? Perish the thought!

It's the first weekend of October and Wolves are already just fifth from bottom and in real danger of being relegated from the Fizzy Cola Super Top League, or whatever the fuck they're calling it this season (it's still the second division as far as I'm concerned.) Yesterday's humiliation was losing one-nil to West Ham, something that, living in London, I'm no doubt going to be reminded of for the next week or two.
  Now we keep getting told by their Chief Executive Jez Moxey that the club has to be run as a business, but it clearly isn't working is it Jez? In the real business world, companies tend to get the best out of their employees by offering incentives for results, so allow me to offer an idea. Instead of paying your (ahem) 'top' players X thousand more than your less gifted ones, how about paying them all the same wage and giving them a 100% bonus if they win? The difference between plain pay and double money should get the lazy bastards motivated. Add some extra bonuses for higher league placings and the fuckers will be promoted by the end of March.
  Or you could just carry on paying them huge sums regardless of performance and watch the crowds fall to 14,000 again when they drop, which will no doubt see you out the door, too. Your call Jez, you top business-type fella, you.

Meanwhile in Iraq, a bunch of loonies stuck in the twelfth century continue to saw the heads off Westerners too stupid to listen to their consulate when it tells them to leave because it's not safe.
  As I write this, two Americans have been beheaded and a British bloke is currently awaiting his turn. The Islamic vermin responsible want the release of certain female Islamic prisoners being held in the West and, predictably, Tony Blair is considering just such a move. This will send out the message that terrorism works, meaning we can all look forward to more of the same.
  The way to play this out would be to follow the German example when they dealt with the French Resistance in WWII. For every German soldier the French shot, the Germans rounded up a handful of French and blew them away and pretty soon there was very little resistance left. Instead of releasing these female prisoners, Tony should line them up in front of a camera and send his own tape to Al-Jazeera with a commentary along the lines of 'These are the ones you want releasing, right?. Your move, loonies.'  Then, if they kill our bloke, we give their girls a really close haircut.
  It'll never happen, of course, and why? Because we're concerned with their 'Human Rights' while they're concerned with 'Destroy The Infidels At Any Cost' and there's only ever going to be one winner in those circumstances, isn't there?

According to the leaflet that's just dropped through the door, the Inner London Congestion Charge is going up again. First it was a fiver to drive into or through London, then everbody's favourite 'Socialist' Ken Livingstone pushed it up to eight quid and now we're told that from January, it may be going up to eleven quid. Oh, and the zone is being extended all the way west into Fulham, too (no doubt to cop some revenue from all those mums doing the school run in their Chelsea tractors.) We keep getting told that the reason for this is to reduce congestion on London's roads (although, curiously, nobody ever seems to question where all this money is going as it certainly ain't visible in an improved public transport infrastructure - then again, haven't we got an insanely expensive Olympics to host a few years down the line?) Anyway, a moment's reflection in anybody sane would suggest that the reason London's roads are so congested is that only half of them are ever in use by Joe Public in his Ford Mondeo. Think about it. Most main roads are two lanes wide in either direction, but ever since the introduction of bus lanes, all the cars are now limited to one lane. In effect, you've doubled the amount of traffic at a stroke by halving the amount of road it can travel on. Of course there's going to be congestion! Cynically fleecing the motorist by charging them huge sums of money to pass through the City or forcing them to take a long detour (and thereby gridlocking all the outer roads) is the kind of warped logic that ends up concluding if some horses are brown and some cows are brown then some horses must be cows. It just doesn't work that way.
   Years ago, before the introduction of  bus lanes, I had a job that entailed driving a van all over London day in, day out. It used to take me forty-five minutes to an hour to get from Elephant & Castle to West Drayton. Yesterday, it took me two and a quarter hours. The twenty minutes it took to cross Vauxhall Bridge illustrates my point perfectly. I kept having to let buses in from the left-hand lane because they wanted to go straight on, whilst I couldn't get into the left-hand lane to actually turn left until the very end of the road or I'd cop a fine courtesy of one of the squillion bus-lane cameras on every lamp-post. Sheer madness! Ken, forget screwing the motorist over to pay for a showpiece in 2012 that nobody apart from you actually wants, scrap all the bus lanes, pull down the cameras and watch the traffic flow again. It's not rocket science, mate. Then again, if you do that, there'll be less money in the coffers to pay for all your visiting terrorist mates, won't there? You odious little pipe.

Seeing as though the weather forced me to spend most of this year's Cornish holiday either in the pub or nearest pasty shop, I figured that for the next month or two, I'd try and stick to the healthy option when it came to the lunchtime sandwiches I bought for work. Imagine my surprise then, when I glanced at the ingredients for my supposedly 'healthy' chicken fajita wrap this afternoon. Apart from the tortilla and the chicken itself, I found such wonderfully diverse things as raising agent E400, glycerol, E500, emusifier E471, preservative E282, acidity regulator E262, colour E160a, preservative E330, emulsifier E433, stabiliser E412 and preservative E260. Further down the list came peppers, salsa and finally sour cream. Now at the risk of being sued, I shaln't divulge the name of the supermarket I bought this little gem from, but let's just say that if this is one of their 'Be Good To Yourself' products I'd hate to see what their 'Fill Yourself Up With Carcinogenic Shit' range has to offer...

If there's one thing I can't stand it's a multi-millionaire with a fucking social conscience. It was bad enough when Sting dragged that poor plate-faced Amazonian twat around the chat-show circuit in order to raise awareness for the rainforests, but the latest one to jump on the bandwagon is really getting on my tits. Step forward Paul Hewson, or fucking 'Bono' as he prefers to be known. Chap, if you're that concerned about Third World debt, why not use some of your immeasurably vast fortune to do something about it, rather than inflicting your tedious soap-boxing on anyone who'll listen. Nelson Mandela may be impressed, but the rest of us aren't. Never mind 'Live Aid II', If this really means so much to you, why not organise a global sponsored silence? You agree never to record another boring sub-standard 'rock-song-for-the-middle-aged-homeowner' and we'll all give you a quid to fuck off and never come back. This approach sounds far more reasonable to me, Boner old son. You'd no doubt make a fortune for your African pals and we'd all be spared anymore of your God-awful Simple Minds tribute band soundalike records. Oh, and those yellow shades make you look a twat, too. Twat.

I've long since realised that the Scots are 'running' this country, but it's only just dawned on me that they've bagged the BBC, too. Did you notice in the recent Wimbledon coverage how Tim Henman was always 'Britain's Tim Henman', but that Andy 'misgyno-racist' Murray was always referred to as'The young Scot'? Isn't he British as well? Or is that term only reserved for us English wankers? As if to add insult to injury, the exact moment after I'd made this observation, I was given the results from the Scottish Premier League before a Scottish weather-girl began her report by commenting on how many hours of sunshine Edinburgh had had. Come back Hadrian, all is forgiven... 

Have you noticed that whenever somebody asks you how you are, they don't actually give a shit? This really annoys me, as it's a total waste of my time. You bump into someone you haven't seen for a while and don't particularly like anyway and it's 'Hello, how are you?'  You're expected to reply 'Fine, thanks. Yourself?' to which they'll come back with 'Oh, not too bad' before you both begin a perfectly avoidable conversation.
  People are so socially conditioned to perform this ridiculous routine that you can really derail them when you refuse to play. Try it. Next time someone asks you how you are, put your hand on their shoulder and give them your best 'wounded puppy' expression as you croakily utter 'I've not been well.'
  For added emphasis, take a step forward into their personal space and cough as you begin a long, descriptive account of your imaginary ailments. Use words like 'septic', 'discharge' and 'contagious' and they'll be out of your face and halfway down the road before you know it.

Few things annoy me more than a celebrity playing the 'poor me' card. You know what I mean; people with money and lifestyles that the likes of you and I can only dream of regaling all and sundry in the media about the latest trivial episode in their shallow little lives, usually for a fee and a centre page feature in the Sunday papers. This week we were treated to Gail Porter's tale. You remember her - the little owl-faced Scottish bint famous for showing her arse on the cover of every men's magazine in the late '90s and presenting Channel 4's 'The Big Breakfast' long after Chris Evans, Gaby Roslin, Paula Yates and anyone else remotely watchable had left. Hell, even Zig & Zag had fucked off by the time Gail had her fifteen minutes.
   Anyway, there she was this week with the 'heartbreaking' tale of how her husband had walked out after three years of marriage leaving her all alone (apart from the au pair and the large bank-balance) with their ludicrously-named little girl, Honey. How did she get through this turmoil? How did the brave little thing go about putting her life back on track? By downing a bottle of vodka and some pills in a 'desperate cry for help'. Then, predictably, it was off to the Priory Clinic for a week or two before bravely appearing in public to sell her story and pose for a few pictures - sans make-up - to show the terrible strain she's been under. The more I read, the angrier I got and the more I found myself wondering why her bloke had even stayed with her this long.
  Having had first-hand experience of this type of clingy, over-emotional little woman in the past myself, I can only sympathise with her ex, Dan Hipgrave, and would encourage him to sue for custody of his little girl as soon as his solicitor opens for business tomorrow. There are thousands of women every year who find themselves having to bring up a child alone without access to Gail's sort of money and amazingly, the vast majority of them manage to rebuild their lives and be a good mother without feeling the need to reach for the drinks cabinet and the Anadin. If she really needs her life putting into perspective, I suggest locking her in a hotel room with me for a weekend. I guarantee she'd soon be looking back on the 'traumatic' events of the last month as a fucking Golden Age...

I've just watched the highlights of the latest Wolves defeat (4-1 at home to Southampton), and as far as I'm concerned, that's the end of our Premiership campaign for a few more years.
  There are many reasons why we've been so shite in our first time in the top fight, but the biggest one is the fact that our 'Chief Executive', Jez Moxey, is a twat. He has been quoted as saying that a football team must be run as a business, and that you can't just go round buying players to get youself out of trouble. Fair enough, Jez, but here's a thought. Being in the Premier League brings in a guaranteed £20+ million quid every season with another three or four million coming in through other associated sponserships. Add in the fact that there's a full house at Molineux every home game and I'd say that you had a pretty good incentive to splash out six or seven million on the transfer market last January in order to secure another twenty million pound payday next year, but did you? Did you bollocks! You couldn't even be bothered to sort out the twelve players that will be out of contract in the summer. Result? Relegation, the loss of twenty million quid and the home gates down by six or seven thousand a week next season.
  Run a business, Jez? I wouldn't trust you to run a bath, you clueless fucker...

The P.C. Brigade are having a pop at the deaf now. They reckon that some of the signings used to indicate people of other nationalities and persuasions are offensive. The signs for a Chinaman (pulling the corner of one's eye to make it appear slanted), an Indian (finger pointing to centre of forehead to indicate a bindi) and a homosexual person (limp, hanging wrist) are all deeply distressing and should be replaced immediately. Therefore, the sign for a Chinaman is to become a finger moved from the heart to the right shoulder and then to the hip (supposedly indicating a traditional Chinese tunic.) The sign for an Indian becomes a traced finger-outline of the shape of India's coastline (?), and a homosexual person will be indicated by - wait for it - placing a clenced fist on one palm while giving a wobbly 'thumbs up'. I can think of my own sign for the bearded, lentil-eating prick who came up with this crap. Two fingers, followed by a fist moving rapidly forward.

The global march of the corporate fat cat continues, with HSBC, the former Midland Bank, posting record-breaking profits of over seven billion pounds. That's pretty good isn't it? I bet the next time you get charged twenty quid for going a few pence overdrawn, you'll be saying, "Well, at least my bank made seven billion quid profit this year!" Given the state of the financial markets anyway, I really don't see the point of giving your money to Sir John Bond and his overpaid cronies to look after. Why not buy a load of gold sovereigns and stick them in a strongbox instead? They're bound to be worth more in a few years and at least you'll have the pleasure of knowing that no useless suit who couldn't change a lightbulb in the real world will have been leeching off your hard-earned to finance his portfolio. Curiously, HSBC shares dipped 8.5p when the announcement was made. Could it be that people are finally getting sick of only making a few pence a year interest on their current accounts while Bond and his ilk pick up millions in perks and share options? There's hope for you lot yet...

I've banged on about the lack of originality in the music industry before. When I was a kid, we went from Glam to Disco to Punk. Then we had Ska, New Wave, New Romance until finally in 1986, those three wankers Stock, Aitken and Waterman killed all trace of originality stone dead.
  Since '86, its been remixed cover after remixed cover until we've reached the stage where they're starting to cover the very crap that began it all. I heard some teenage airhead's cover of Kylie's 'I Should Be So Lucky' on the radio today! The British Music industry has officially disappeared up its own arse, so it comes as no surprise to learn that toys are the next thing to get recycled.
  Know what this Christmas' must-have toys are? 'Ninja Turtles'. Thirteen years after they first appeared, they're back. So too is 'He-Man'. You can even get plug-in 'Atari' consoles once more. Unreal.
  I guess I shouldn't honk too much, though. The moment they bring back 'Evel Knievel', I'm having one!   

Following the screening of that 'Secret Policeman' programme, the Police Federation has, oh so predictably, begun yet another bout of self-flagellation for the benefit of the media.
  Yes, there are racist elements in the organisation, just as there are racists in any firm. The police claim to employ a representative cross-section of all aspects of society, so they shouldn't be surprised when a few narrow-minded fuckwits turn up in the ranks. Rather than over-reacting and embracing every word of the hugely damaging MacPherson report (the one that said that the whole Police service was 'institutionally racist'), the top brass should concentrate on rooting out the bigots and stop making the rank-and-file feel like they have to apologise for their very existence.
  This isn't likely to happen though, not while they allow the existence of a Black Police Federation (a racist concept by its very definition) and cannot see the irony in it.

Look, if you're going to use the escalator on the Underground at the same time as me then there's a couple of things we ought to get straight. It's a moving staircase, ok? That means you just stand there and you get taken to the top. Simple, eh? You don't need to walk up the fucker - it's going that way on it's own. What you do is stand quietly and enjoy the ride.
  What you don't do is come up behind me, slap your briefcase into the back of my knee and say 'Excuse me' in a whiny, stroppy tone of voice because all that's going to get you is a smack. You want to walk? Take the stairs, that's what they're there for. Otherwise, chill. You'll live longer...

Designer clothing - I simply can't get my head around the fact that there are people who will happily pay four or five times more than me for an item of clothing simply because it has a trendy label on it. Maybe it's just me being an old fart, but I can't fathom why anyone would choose to walk round with a huge 'Diesel' or 'Evisu' logo splashed across their chest and pay serious wedge for the privilege of doing so.
  Are these people so bereft of personality that they view this as some sort of validation of self-worth? 'Look at me, my moribund little existence is so wrapped up in the clothes I wear that I actually pay these manufacturers to advertise their products for them.' 
  Worse still are those idiots who stroll round in 'Anti-Fit' clothing with their crotch hanging down by their knees like circus clowns on day-release just because they're the 'in' thing. Jesus, if they got any shallower, they'd evaporate. I have a mate who is always in the latest labels and never misses an opportunity to remind me of the fact. He will happily stand there in some non-descript black t-shirt with a little squiggle embossed on his right tit and point out that he's paid more for that than I have for my entire outfit, all the time wearing a smug smile on his fat face. Ok, so you paid £100 for five seconds of stitching by some nine-year-old girl in a back-street sweat-shop in Shanghai and you're laughing at me?
  Sorry, chief, but the needle on my twat-compass is only pointing one way right now, know what I mean?

Five years ago this would've made me laugh. Now? Merely resigned, numb and slightly sad. Trading Standards officers from Powys County Council in Wales have ordered Black Mountains Smokery; the makers of spicy 'Welsh Dragon Sausages', to rename their chilli, leek and pork bestseller. From now on, the product must be labelled as 'Welsh Dragon Pork Sausages'. Why? According to a Trading Standards spokesman "The product was not sufficiently precise to inform a purchaser of the true nature of the food". In other words, the company was at risk of prosectuion unless it categorically stated on it's packaging that the sausages don't actually contain any dragon. There is so much I could add here, but it's late at night and I'm simply too tired...

Jamie Manderson, eh? What a star! This thirty-three year old piece of shit has just clocked up his 48th offence for driving whilst disqualified and been jailed for five months and handed a two-year ban. So far, so New Labour, I hear you cry, but driving while disqualified is the least of this prick's claim to fame.
  Apparently, over the last eighteen years, Jamie has amassed one hundred and ninety-eight seperate convictions ranging from dodgy motoring to armed robbery. Let's just reflect on that for a moment, shall we? Nearly two hundred convictions and this bloke will be on the streets again by Bonfire Night.
  Come on! It's not just me, is it?
  How many more misdemeanors will this clown be allowed to commit before somebody decides he is a serial liability and removes him from decent society for good? With this Government in charge, probably about the time that Wolves win the Premiership. I wonder how many kids he's got? And who's paying for them?
  Just think; two hundred years ago, Jamie would have been an Australian citizen by now...or on the end of a noose. Ah, the good old days. Worth putting up with rickets for in my opinion!

I'm really getting to hate all of those bastards who insist on owning a sodding great four-litre 4x4 when they live in the middle of London. What in God's name do they think they're playing at? What possible use do they have for variable transmission, apart from making a quick getaway from their kid's school in the next street after they've dropped them off. And I bet they're really grateful for those huge great tyres when they have to mount the kerb to get their fat arses two paces nearer to the fucking cashpoint, aren't they? As for those bull bars on the front; well, when that rogue elephant thunders toward them down Chiswick High Street, at least they'll know that the collision damage on their metallic paint will be kept to a minimum. Finally, a special note to those with the top of the range model with the winch on the front. Why not use it to see if you can pull your head out of your arse, you twat.

I'm utterly sick of the double standards employed in this country when it comes to the whole 'European Community' thing. I mean, whenever you have to fill in your height and weight these days, it has to be in centimetres and kilogrammes. Now I haven't got a Scooby how much I weigh in metric but I know it exactly in imperial. However, you're not allowed to do that anymore as we're all part of the grand European vision. Funny thing though, if anyone asks you how much your baby weighed at birth and you tell them three point five eight kilos, they'll look at you as if you'd just eaten a stoat. Tell them seven pounds fourteen ounces and they instantly know what you're on about. They have a frame of reference and they can picture it. No one wants five hundred and sixty-eight fluid ounces of beer, but they'll happily have a pint. So it really annoys me to read about the Government prosecuting shopkeepers who sell stuff in pounds and ounces - particularly when the same Government adamantly refuses to convert all the road signs to kilometers ever since it's own internal report suggested such a move would 'totally alienate' the voting public. Bunch of two-faced tossers...

You know those viewing figures that they publish every week to let you know that 'Eastenders' is getting less viewers than 'Coronation Street'? Well, these figures are based on a system that logs the viewing habits of more than 200,000 people with special T.V. boxes throughout the country. Their weekly telly is analysed before being 'averaged up' to create the national figure. Thing is, any channel registering less that 1,250 viewers is rated as a zero viewing figure for official purposes.
  Guess how many BBC Digital Television and Radio channels were given a zero rating at one point or another in the last twelve months? Thirty-seven. Guess how much of YOUR money was wasted on unwanted broadcasts that nobody took any notice whatsoever of? Two hundred and seventy-nine million quid.
  So next time you find yourself wondering why you're watching Indoor Crown Green Bowling on a Saturday afternoon instead of Premiership Football, you'll know why.

A rare victory for common sense this week, as Channel Four was vindicated in the courts over it's televising of it's 'Despatches' programme, 'Undercover Mosque'. For those of you who missed it, Channel Four sent an undercover film crew to infiltrate a supposedly 'mainstream' mosque in Birmingham, and were treated to such laid-back, illuminated opinions that women were 'deficient', ten-year-old girls who refuse to wear the hijab should be hit and that homosexuals should be 'thrown off mountains'. Astounded by this, the programme makers passed their tapes along to West Midlands Police, who promptly charged them with stirring up racial hatred. After the Old Bill and the CPS spent £14,000 of your money putting a case together, Ofcom immediatly saw sense and booted it out.
  Now West Midlands Police and the CPS have agreed to pay £100,000 damages, also out of the public purse, to a charity of Channel Four's choice and will both have to issue public apologies. Bizarrely, it is still being maintained that the comments made by the preachers in this oh-so-relaxed and enlightened 'mainstream' mosque were 'taken out of context'. Curiously, no-one has yet been forthcoming to explain exactly what the correct context might be...

The Education System in this country just gets better and better, doesn't it? The latest brainwave is that, in future, the 'F' grading (fail) will be replaced with a new grade - 'N' for 'nearly'. I wonder how many Guardian readers it took to come up with that one.
  For God's sake, people either pass or they fail, there's no 'nearly'. This all stems from the bleeding-heart liberal brigade who think that all kids should be spared the pain of ever losing by removing any trace of competition from their lives. You can just imagine the type of petulant little bleeder this is producing, can't you?
  Just wait until they finish their 'education' and enter the real world. Imagine the letter that follows the first job interview. "Well done! You nearly got the job. Now fuck off..."

Have you noticed there seem to be more homeless people on the street these days? Nearly every street corner in the West End seems to be populated by a 'Big Issue' seller.
  There really is no need for this, guys.
  Instead of standing around flogging crap magazines, why don't you apply for asylum? All you'd have to do is tell the authoritites that you were fleeing persecution, and hey presto - free flat and benefits. Just let that beard grow a little longer and you're on the gravy train for life!

I love the way that local councils these days seem to delight in finding ever more ludicrous ways to piss your money up the wall. I've just read that more than a million pounds is being spent across Northumberland, Cumbria and Yorkshire as part of the 'Red Alert Conservation Campaign', which is aiming to ensure the survival of our native red squirrel by creating 'buffer zones' in which they can live and breed without being chased out by their larger and more common cousins.
  A million quid wasted simply to try and preserve a different flavour of furry tree-rat. It'd be fucking cheaper to just dye all the grey ones..

Returning to the previous Rant; a survey commissioned by one of the broadsheets found that a colossal 97% of the public felt that, far from being racist, Kilroy's comments merely reflected the right to free speech that millions of Britons died for in two World Wars. Not that the Left will see it that way, of course. Funny how this racism thing seems to be a one-way street, doesn't it?  I mean, there's hook-handed fundamentalist Muslim 'cleric' Abu Hamza preaching hatred against the West every week outside his Mosque in Finsbury Park and yet nobody objects to him having his say. The man is even given a police escort to and from his council house and still no-one bats an eyelid. Just imagine if Kilroy was claiming state benefit like Hamza. They'd have lynched the poor bastard by now...

Robert Kilroy-Silk has been sacked from the BBC for allegedly 'racist' comments. Apparently, he reckons the Arab states are 'promoting suicide bombers, amputating limbs and repressing women'. How dare you, Robert! You know Tony doesn't like it when people decide to make their own minds up based on the facts, rather than blandly accept the Government's point of view. You're like the little boy who told the crowd that the Emperor had no clothes on. He was perfectly within his rights to do so, but he still got a clip round the ear all the same. Bad racist! Off to commercial radio with you...

Hands up if you've been dumb enough to sign up for one of the New Year magazine collection scams. You know the ones - get your first issue and 'thing' for only £1.99 and spend the next two years shelling out a tenner a month to clutter your house up with tawdry crap. This year's selections are particularly hideous. We've got the 'Lord of the Rings' (badly) hand-painted metal figures (is it Gandalf? is it Dumbledore? no, it's the Archbishop of Canterbury), the build-your-own Red Baron biplane (look at the size of that Fokker!) and the predictably dull 'Teach Yourself Calligraphy or Crochet or Computers' ones. There is however, a publication that towers over all the others in terms of sadness - the 'Collectible Delivery Vans of Yesteryear' magazine, where six quid a fortnight gets you a toy car and a factsheet. Wow. Just how empty does your life have to be before signing up to this one seems like a good move? If you ever see me buying something like this, kill me. Please.

The playing of the hymn 'Jerusalem' could be banned at England's home tests against Pakistan next year in case any Pakistani Muslims are offended by the 'build Jerusalem in this green and pleasant (?) land' bit. Meanwhile, a CD of the same hymn sung by the Ashes-winning side is a hot tip for a Christmas Top Ten slot with all the proceeds going to - you guessed it - the Pakistan earthquake relief fund. Nothing like a bit religious tolerance in this wonderful Socialist paradise of ours, is there?

We received an email at work this week from the management saying that changes are afoot. They didn't say what these changes would be, as they haven't been decided upon yet, but we were to be aware that whatever these changes turned out to be, they would be implemented and in place by April 1st next year (how apt). Re-organisation; don't you just love it?
  We get a lot of reorganisation where I work, usually from people who have just been promoted in from somewhere else and who have no idea what it is that we do.
  Strange, but have you noticed that every form of workplace reorganisation comes from gits like this? This is because all those people who can confidently get on with doing their job are too busy actually doing it to fuck around with things, and those who can't do it that well are too busy keeping their heads down to avoid being sussed out.  
  This leaves a particular breed of clueless, interfering twat to come along with their second-class Business Degree and ace an under-attended interview by spouting cliche'd buzz-phrases like 'Performance Indicators', 'Restructuring' and 'Business Excellence Models'.
  If only we could apply the Kenny Everett principle with these strokers: "Round 'em up, put 'em in a field and bomb the bastards!"

If the London Congestion Charge is designed solely to coax people onto public transport and discourage motorists from bringing their cars into the city, rather than simply being a cynical tax that was recently increased by three quid a day to fund the 2012 Olympics, then how come they've started to offer discount tickets if you pay monthly or annually?
  Obvious, isn't it? Ken doesn't give a toss whether or not you drive into London as long as you dip your hand in your pocket for the privilege. Why doesn't he start taxing cyclists, eh? Surely by now he's figured out that they're using the roads for free while everyone else is coughing up? Oh hang on...how does he get to work? Ah! Now things make sense...

I lost count of the number of dedicated New Year Resolutionists I saw jogging round Tooting Bec on the way home this evening. Why do people do this to themselves every year? Ok, so you've put on a few pounds over the festive season - cut back a bit on the pies and booze, moderate your calorie intake and in a few weeks, you'll be back to where you were.
  Alternatively, join a gym. Make a lifestyle change and pump some iron. Anything has got to be better than turning yourself into one of those purple-faced wobbly clowns I saw gasping their way round the dirt-track earlier. Joggers will tell you that they live longer. Well, assuming the sudden coronary doesn't get them in the early stages, they can probably take comfort from the fact that spending an hour a day jogging could increase their life expectancy by...oh, by about as much as all those wasted hours added up.
  Worse than the joggers, though, were the 'mature' couple I saw going through their new 'thing' - Tai-Chi. Who the hell came up with that one? Slow-motion Kung Fu for Geriatrics. Deeply weird.

Ok, so who fell for the New Year's Resolution crap again this year? Why do people insist on conning themselves with this ridiculous social conditioning year after year? You can hear them at a minute past midnight in every house up and down the land promising to cut back on the booze or knock the fags on the head. Ask them again on the sixth or seventh if their resolutions are still intact and they'll tell you with a guilty smile that they just couldn't stick to it. I've been through all this shit myself on many occasions in the past, which is why this year I decided to make one that I could keep with the minimum of stress. My Resolution for 2004 is to headbutt anybody who tells me to 'Have a Nice Day'. That way, genuinely, one of us will.

Its just been on the news that at least twenty thousand people have been killed in an earthquake in Iran. Now there's no way I'm going to even try and get an amusing observation out of such carnage...but have you noticed that anytime there's a disaster of some sort in the Middle East, there always seems to be a little old woman dressed in black wearing a black scarf wailing at the top of her lungs and waving her arms in the air? I'm convinced it's always the same woman and ITN have got her on the payroll. Anytime they get the tip-off, they call her agent and arrange to meet her on site. 'Right, love, straighten that scarf and give us plenty of anguish...in 3, 2, 1 and - action!'

What is it that makes people want to spend eight quid to sit behind me in the cinema and have a fucking good chat?

We're on the home run to Christmas, and this is the week where cards start coming through your door from all those 'friends' who can't be bothered to pick up the fucking phone and speak to you from one December to the next. Now don't get me wrong, it's always nice to hear from old aquaintances, but come on! There are fifty-one other weeks in the year for these people to show you they give a shit that you're alive, but do they bother?  Do they 'taters! Yet, regular as clockwork, you can guarantee that their cards will be the first ones through your door every Yuletide, positively dripping with 'See you in the New Year' sentiments. One thing's for sure - it's a foregone conclusion that if you're unfortunate enough to drop dead in 2004, the first ham sandwich consumed at your wake will be eaten by some bastard you haven't spoken to for twenty years...

I love the way the media keeps referring to the underachieving Canadian tennis 'ace' Greg Rusedski as 'Britain's Number Two Player'. What a laughable title that is. Britain is not exactly renowned for it's tennis players, is it? We're the only country that does this - overrates the abilities of our crap sportsmen. You never hear the world press alluding to 'Egypt's Number Two Ski-Jumper' or 'Holland's Top Mountaineer', do you? Of course not. They ignore their losers. Ours get the MBE..

Above all else - above every single little thing on this planet that annoys me (and you folks know that's a pretty substantial list) - there's one thing guaranteed to cause the red mist to descend and put me in a skull-fracturing frame of mind. Whistling. What is it that makes certain people want to publicly broadcast a piss-poor, wind-powered rendition of a crap tune whenever they sit next to me on the bus? Its always the same culprits, too - old men of a certain age. You know; the ones that wear tank-tops under their jackets and insist on putting on a tie every day even though they finished work fifteen years previously. You got a tune in your head, Grandad? Fine, I've got a fist in my pocket. What say we do each other a favour and keep them both where they are, eh?

Yesterday saw the last ever flight of a Concorde, bringing the age of supersonic passenger flight to an end. Aviation experts say that it is unlikely there will ever be supersonic passenger travel again as it is too expensive. Well, that's great news, don't you think? Bollocks to technological advancement, let's all stop designing stuff because it costs too much. Imagine if the Egyptians had adopted that mindset. 'Pyramid? Sod that, let's just stack a couple of slabs up there and we can all go home.'  Whatever happened to national pride? The cream of post-war British boffins designed Concorde as transport for the future; I wonder what they think at seeing us taking such a big step backwards? Why not go the whole hog and shut down Rover, too? I mean, cars are really pricey to run, aren't they? Let's all go buy a horse, we'll save a fortune.

All the newspapers are banging on about George Bush's visit this week. Apparently, it'll be the first full state visit ever by an American President and will cost something in the region of £6.5 million (enough to pay for 150+ extra policemen, if you're interested.) An estimated 14000 police will be on duty during his three day stay, not to mention the 700 strong entourage the man himself will bring. Everyone from armed Secret Service agents to personal chefs. Something like 250,000 people are expected to march through London demonstrating against him (not that he'll hear them as the glass in his armoured limo is three inches thick.) 'Experts' are popping up all over the place to talk about terrorist threats and security issues and generally, the whole of this great city is in a bit of a tizz. Curious, then, that the only thing that crosses my mind at this time is how much old Dubya resembles a slightly constipated chimpanzee...

Have you noticed how there are no real competitions on the products you buy anymore? Over the last few years, traditional 'open now and see if you've won' promotions have given way to these coded-entry things. Every time you see some cash or a car up for grabs on the side of a crisp packet or chocolate bar, it's always a case of texting a code that you find printed on the wrapper to a premium-rate phone number. They usually have the audacity to say something along the lines that there are 'One Million Prizes to be Won!'. No there aren't. You aren't 'winning' anything; you're simply paying an extra 25p of your own money on top of the cost of your crisps for an arbitrary and unquantifiable entry in a virtual game of chance. Of the 'million' prizes; let's face it, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and eighty are simply going to be another bag of crisps, which you could have gone and bought for the same cost as the text message you just sent attempting to win them. The worst offenders are Rowntree's, the makers of 'Kit-Kat', who don't even bother to offer you a faux-win, they simply ask you to collect as many 'Kit-Kat' wrappers as you can and use them as 'bids' on their great 'prizes'. Whoopee. So the more chocolate wafers you buy, the better your chance of coming away with a new car that you don't really want anyway. This isn't a competition, it's a fucking raffle. The only difference is that other raffles don't require you to shell out for three grand's worth of crap chocolate in order to enter...

The Home Secretary has announced that any Asylum Seeker/Economic Migrant/Scrounging Bastard (delete depending on your point of view) who was resourceful enough to smuggle his raggedy arse into the country will be allowed to stay here, no questions asked, as it would be cheaper for the tax-payer in the long-run than processing all the deportation appeals. For God's sake, Dave, put the dog in charge - at least it might be able to see the scale of the problem...

You know when you wake up in the middle of the night and start pondering life, the universe and everything? Well, there I was at three this morning wondering about the concept of Heaven (like you do.)
  Now, I had a Catholic School upbringing (taught by Jesuits, no less) which almost killed the whole religion thing for me. Nevetheless, I'm amazed at the amount of people who profess to want to go to Heaven when they die. Think about it; if the Bible is to be believed then those who praise God the most stand the best chance of getting through the Pearly Gates. Aside from the question this raises about God's self-esteem (is He really that insecure?), just imagine the type of people you'd be spending eternity with. All those regular Sunday church-goers with their nice hats, the Salvation Army, the born-again brigade and let's not forget the happy-clappy fruit-cakes with their guitars. Sound like your idea of fun? If not, then it's Hell for you, fella, and that's where established Christianity falls apart for me. You can either suck up to the Big Guy all you life and then spend the hereafter doing more of the same or it's pitchforks up the arse time. Crap choice, innit? Where's the middle ground?
  So basically, I've decided to spend the rest of my life being a Viking Berserker. That way, when I shuffle off this mortal coil it's going to be meat, mead and Valkyries and plenty of it! If you can think of a better afterlife, you're welcome to it, but if not, I'll see you there and the first one's on me!

Having completed a course in Japanese last year at what my generation still affectionately refers to as 'night school', I found myself amazed by the vast range of courses on offer to anyone who can be arsed to give an extra hour or two one night a week. Apart from the languages, the guitar lessons and the photography classes, I happened to note that this year's prospectus now includes the dreaded 'Wine Tasting'. Now ever since that Jilly Goolden creature infested our screens a decade ago, this whole wine tasting thing has gotten out of hand. A wine tasting club used to consist of a dozen people all bringing a bottle and having a gulp of each other's offerings before wandering back to the bus-stop quietly pissed. In the last ten years, though, we've gone all 'aficianado' about it. There's all that 'sniffing the cork' crap, the decanting (totally unnecessary in any wine modern wine as there's no sediment), the swirling round the mouth and the spitting out. Where the fuck did all that come from? The whole point of wine - the entire reason it was created in the first place - is to get one swiftly and effectively wankered whilst still maintaining the illusion that one is being witty and erudite to one's surrounding company. It's not there to be swirled and spat. You wouldn't go to a five-star restaurant, nibble the fois gras and then stick you fingers down your throat, would you? (Well, not unless you were a supermodel, anyway.) Then there's all those insanely pretentious terms of description that the wankers use. All this 'jammy overtones' and 'cinnamon aftertaste' bollocks. Give me a fucking break! Six terms are all you need to categorise any wine. Red or White (fuck off with your 'Rose', you pretentious tool, you're merely mixing an iffy white with an average red and rebottling), Sweet or Dry and Fruity or Spicy - that's it. Finally, and speaking as someone who always keeps a dozen decent reds in the house, I can assure you that there is no noticible difference between a six quid bottle and a sixty quid one. You're only paying for the snob value. So long as you stay away from any two-ninety-nine supermarket specials, you're more than likely going to enjoy it. Right, now that lot is off my chest, I'm going for a pint. So pop down your local 'Thresher', get yourself a bottle of Cabernet-Shiraz (last year's Rosemount Estate is a stonker) and enjoy every last drop of the fucker. Whatever you do girls, remember - swallow, don't spit!

It's have a pop at the National Lottery time again. No, tell you what, let's make this more interesting and have a little audience participation, shall we? I'll list three 'worthy causes' and you try and guess which one received sums of £191,600 and £336,200 respectively from the Lottery Community Fund. Ready? Was it...
A charity for premature babies that applied for Lottery funding to finance a new neonatal unit?A halfway house built to provide a safe haven for victims of domestic abuse?A campaign fund set up to fight deportation orders issued against bogus asylum seekers? What? You need a clue? Alright...'What does Cherie Blair do for a living?' There, easy wasn't it?

The BBC have just announced that they're putting the licence fee up again next year. It's going from £116 to £122. Now, I know I'm not the only one who hates shelling out extortionate amounts of money to this government-approved monopoly year after year. It really pisses me off paying these jokers when I watch a grand total of about four of five BBC programmes per week. I'm not a big telly watcher anyway, but that's not the point, they say. Apparently, I'm paying for the privilege of owning a televisual receiver, and it's purely incidental whether I choose to view the BBC's content or not; it's there if I want it. Fine. I'll send Greg Dyke a £122 bill for having the ability to access this site. I mean, it's there if he wants it, isn't it? The more I think about the BBC, the angrier I get. Take their marketing, for example. The bastards have the audacity to sell DVDs and videos of programmes that you and I and every other licence-payer have paid them to create! They should be sending each new DVD out to all of us with a bloody thank-you note, never mind trying to flog them using airtime that we've all bought for them! Wankers! The sooner everybody goes pay-per-view and puts these jokers out of business, the better.

Economics 'experts' employed by the Government (on huge salaries, no doubt) today announced that they've worked out the net worth of Great Britain. Apparently, if the nation was a PLC, it'd be valued at six trillion pounds. That works out at roughly £86,000 for every man, woman and child. Now obviously, this is an average figure and some people are undoubtedly worth more than others, which is why they've taken the trouble to point out that net worth of the average citizen (that's you, monkey-boy!) is a mere one six-hundredth of a Beckham. Nice to feel valued, isn't it? 

Anyone see that programme on Channel Four recently where they got a classful of this year's GCSE pupils and gave them a month of schooling as it was in the Fifties? Very interesting. They put the kids through four weeks of real classwork and discipline and at the end of it gave them three genuine Fifties test papers; Maths, English and Science. Only seven out of a class of thirty passed all three tests. Thing is, they weren't 'O' levels, they were the '11+'. As a footnote to the experiment, we were then told how the pupils had done in their GCSEs and almost all of them had attained 'A' grades in their Maths and English exams. Anyone surprised? Still, the Government assures us there has been absolutely no dumbing down of standards in the education system, Right Tony? 

The University of Pennysylvania have announced a revolutionary medical breakthrough. After years of experimentation, the boffins there have announced that they have succeeded in increasing the muscle mass of mice by 40% using injections of human growth hormone. Well, that's fantastic news, don't you think? Years of scientific study and capital investment to produce a rodent capable of unwrapping it's own Edam. I bet all the cancer sufferers and AIDS victims in Pennysylvania are positively delighted at the world-class level of bio-engineering being pioneered in their fair city.

Modern Art again. The latest exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery has just opened. Entitled 'New Blood', it is described as a showcase for the best new and contemporary British talent. So what fascinating glimpses of cutting edge art will you be seeing for your twenty-six quid entrance fee? Well, there's a painting of a heroin victim with blood running from her nostrils, a rope made from fifty-four toilet rolls and a globe fashioned from compressed rat carcasses. You can also see Tracy Emin's unmade bed and Damian Hirst's half a sheep while you're there, too. A thrilling afternoon, I'm sure you'll agree and all brought to you by Nigella Lawson's husband, Mr. Charles Saatchi; the man who helped to make Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister. The fucker has a lot to answer for...

'A' is for Art: I don't know much about art, but I know what I don't like. Mainly, this consists of anything in the Tate Modern, with arseholes like Damian Hirst and Tracey Emin holding special places of contempt in my heart. Sorry, but if it's a toss-up between looking at half a pickled sheep or an unmade bed, or simply crossing the river, strolling up to the National Gallery and gazing upon Turner's 'The Fighting Temeraire' or something by van de Capelle (I'm a sucker for a sea-scape), then it's a bit of a no-brainer. So-called 'experts' will no doubt point out that art is all about challenging preconceptions and that there is as much merit in a mural by Banksy as there is in a Botticelli, but frankly, the experts (in this field as in so many others) are full of shit. Be honest with yourself - which would you rather spend your afternoon quietly contemplating, this or this?

My biggest ambition in life is to be rich enough to have nothing better to do with my money than buy mail-order tat from the back of the Sunday colour supplements. You know the sort of thing - plates with kittens on them, porcelain children pushing a wheelbarrow, Elvis clocks and the like. The day I win the lottery, I'll devote my waking moments to the aquisition of every last piece of magazine crap I can get my hands on. However, if I searched for a hundred years, I could never find anything as vulgar and tasteless as the statue I saw in last Sunday's magazine - a fifteen-inch high hand-painted resin model of the World Trade Centre entitled 'In Remembrance' and priced at £55. It was absolutely fucking hideous. I've just got to buy one and glue a small model jet nose-first halfway up the left tower. Realism is the key to this sort of thing, don't you think?

One of my favourite times of the year is fast approaching - Hallowe'en. I love taking the time and trouble to re-educate the youth of today away from indoctrinated American bollocks, namely 'Trick or Treat'. Join me if you will on the big day by following my example. Fill an empty washing-up liquid bottle with urine (your own, if you like) and hide behind your letterbox. When the little bastards knock the door and yell "Trick or treat!", simply reply "Trick!", and give them a squirt.  It's not cruel, it's character-building. Years from now, they'll look back fondly and thank you for it.

The justification behind the decision to build a new runway at Stansted Airport is that, according to a thirty-year 'projection', the number of people travelling by air will have tripled by the year 2030. Now, given that virtually every environmental study gives the world's oil supply another fifty years at best, is there really any point in spending all those millions tarmacking the countryside for something that is only going to be used for a couple of decades? Especially if they end up using the same contractors that've been pissing about with resurfacing the M6 for the last umpteen years. It might not even be finished before it becomes redundant! Still, I'm sure it'll make a fine place to park all the useless airliners. They could turn them into restaurants like they did with the old railroad cars in the States. 'Ed's 747 Diner - Home of the Jumbo Burger!'  Only trouble is, without any petrol it's going to be a three day stroll to get there. Still, should work up a bit of an appetite...

Not only are I.Q.'s heading downhill, but attention spans seem to be on their way south, too. Have you noticed that after every news bulletin we have two weather forecasts within an advertising break of one another? What the fuck is that all about? First the national one and then the local one (which gives you a national report anyway.) If, like me, you live in the London area, then it's the same bloody person doing it - usually that ginger Welsh tart (the one with the gob like the Joker from Batman.) Why are they doing this? Is the weather that unpredictable that it's going to radically change in the time it takes for Linda bleeding Barker to flog us whatever tat she's hawking this week? Can't we just go back to what they used to do when they needed to kill time and stick a 'Tom & Jerry' cartoon on instead? I guarantee the viewing figures would be higher! 

This year's crime figures were released recently and made interesting reading. Violent Crime was up 12%. Murder up 7%. Criminal Damage up 6%. Sex Offences up 5%. Gun Crime up 3% and Drug-related crime up 2%. 'Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime', right Tony? Wanker...

If there's one thing guaranteed to put a smile on my face, it's a celebrity suicide. Courtney Love was the latest one to try her hand this week, but unfortunately, her 'cry for help' was heeded in time. Don't you just love it? There's something inherently funny in famous people offing themselves when they've got a lifestyle that the rest of us would kill for. My favourite one was 'INXS' frontman Michael Hutchence, found hanging from his belt in his hotel room in an auto-erotic accident. A good-looking famous guy with thirty million quid in the bank could afford to have every prostitute in the city lining up around the block to clean his clock-weights, but no, he chose to wank himself to death. Hilarious! With this in mind, I've decided to resurrect the 'Dead Pool Sweepstake' at work. For a £1 stake, anyone can nominate a celebrity who they feel is close to the edge. If their choice shuffles off this mortal coil before anybody else's, they win the pot. Last time I ran one of these, one of my mates took £42 thanks to Paula Yates. Set one up at your own workplace, it's great for a laugh. To make it even easier, you don't have to stick to the suicides, just dead will do! Come on, Barrymore, come on...

Another summer and another new low for television. Not content with inflicting yet another series of the tired old 'Big Brother' on us, those oh-so-clever marketing bods have created another sure-fire winner - 'Celebrity Love Island'. In case you haven't heard, the premise is that they've collected together an assorted bunch of Z-list vermin whose only claims to fame seem to be shagging other Z-list vermin, stuck them on a tropical island and will then film them over a fortnight to see if any 'love' happens. Oh fuck off! Why don't the pony-tailed tools behind this latest round of barrel-scraping have the courage of their convictions and just stick hardcore scud films on every evening? Instead of shelling out £100,000 for Rebecca Loos and Abi fucking Titmuss to wander round in their bikinis trying to tempt George Best's son to nob them (again), they should stick a couple of hours of grot on the moment old Trevor McDonald bids us all goodnight. It'd be loads cheaper and it would undoubtedly top the ratings which is the whole point. More importantly, if they did follow this path, at least we'd all know when we were looking at a penis and not have to waste time reading the 'hosted by Patrick Kielty' caption. 

New figures released this week show that Labour's spending on asylum and immigration has topped the £8 billion mark, which equates to an extra £320 in tax for every single household in Britain (apart from the ones occupied by the scroungers themselves, that is.) This means that the national spending in this area has increased by over 900% since they came to power in 1997. Nine hundred percent. There will be an election sometime this year. Please bear these figures in mind when you vote for Tony again because 'you've always voted Labour', or worse, don't even bother turning up at the polling station. If we end up with another half a decade of these jokers, you'll only have yourselves to blame... Well, the local elections have taken place and Tony Blair has seen his policy of 'I know best because you're all monkeys' get the collective finger from the voting public. Even with Fat Boy Prescott's blatent attempts to rig the postal ballots, New Labour still got a spanking. In his typical asinine way, though, the only thing Tony can think of in his defence is to have yet another pop at the Tories. The tactic he's now using is to try and scare us by implying that under a Conservative government, there will be widespread job losses in the public services. Well, yes there will be. It'll be all the Guardian-reading gender reassignment counsellors and five-a-day fruit and veg co-ordinators and good fucking riddance, too. Still, why is it that we all go along with the thought that it's got to be either Tony or Michael come the next election? Personally, I think it's about time we gave someone else a go at running the show (and I don't mean that ginger Scottish fool, either - the Lib Dems are merely 'Diet Labour'; all the same ingredients and none of the fizz.) How would you like it if every single day of your life, you had to choose either beef or pork? 'What about chicken? What about fish?', you'd cry. 'Why can't we have a pizza or a curry?' Exactly. There are other choices out there, people, and I for one don't care which way you vote so long as you actually get of your arses and do it. Less than a quarter of eligible voters turned out this time. Are you all really that happy with things? I'm not. I mean, when the government's own figures show that out of 88,000 new jobs in the education sector, only 4,000 are actually teachers, then it's time for a bit of a change in my book. Bring back Lord Sutch! At least he had the decency to tell everyone he didn't have a fucking clue before they voted for him!

One thing that really jacks me off at work is those people who disappear for a cigarette break for ten minutes every hour. In a typical working day, that's eighty minutes that they're not working. Or, put another way, five hours a week. Multiply this out over a year and it's something like nine and a half days spent sucking on a burning leaf. Well, I for one would like an extra nine and a half days leave credited to my card, but that's not going to happen is it, so I propose a more suitable solution. Everytime my colleagues go off for a fag, I'm going for a wank. All you non-smokers out there, join me in this protest! (although not literally) It's certainly cheaper than smoking (tissues cost less that ciggys) and it'll make you feel a lot better afterwards. What's more, the risks to your health are virtually non-existent. In fact, apart from slight repetitive strain disorder and possibly blindness, it's risk-free. Best of all though - you'll be getting paid for knocking one out. Fantastic!

Ever since I started going to rock pubs as a long-haired youth twenty years ago, I've always wanted to have a leather jacket professionally painted with my favourite album cover. For years I used to see these guys with their 'Iron Maiden' and 'Metallica' designs boldly displayed on their leathers and I'd think 'I wish I knew someone who could paint like that.' So, imagine my joy last year when I found out that a friend of a friend was an artist - and a bloody good one - and he was willing to paint one for me. Fantastic! So now, I am the proud owner of a superbly painted leather (cheers, Paul!) featuring a perfect image of Kate Bush from 'The Kick Inside'.
  Yes, after two decades of wishing I now have my perfect jacket. Except that I am no longer a long-haired youth, I am a thirty-five year old man with a shaved head, a goatee beard, ear-rings and a pierced face. These days, in a leather, I've realised to my dismay that I'm a dead-ringer for Rob Halford from Judas Priest. I look outrageously, totally and unashamedly gay. Add this to the fact that my favourite pub in London, 'The Intrepid Fox' is located in the heart of Soho, just around the corner from the world-famous gay bar,'The Admiral Duncan' and you can easily appreciate the inherent humour of the situation.
  So can I, ducky, so can I...

Ten years ago, a CD player would've set you back four or five hundred quid. Nowadays you can pick one up for forty. Ten years ago you'd have paid five hundred pounds for a Nicam video recorder, these days - sixty notes, tops. This pattern is repeated in virtually all electrical property from televisions to computers. The longer things exist, the cheaper they get. So, why doesn't this apply to other products, then? Insurance, for example. Why do we have to pay more each year to insure our ever-depreciating vehicles despite seeing our no-claims increase? I recently threw out all my old motoring documents and was absolutely gob-smacked to see what I'd shelled out on motorbike insurance in the last decade. If I hadn't been wasting money on something I've never needed, I'd have been riding a hand-built Benelli instead of an old Kawasaki. Fucking parasites.

Mankind has ever proven adept at finding names for things. Animals, trees, fish and birds in all their endless variety have been named. Stars and galaxies millions of light years away have been indexed and catalogued. Even bacteria and viruses that we can't even see have their own titles. So why is it that some of the most fundamental parts of our own body have been given such crap names? I'm talking toes, people. The first part of our bodies that we become aware of and look at the imaginative terms we have for descibing them. 'Big Toe', 'Little Toe', and not forgetting the spectacularly titled 'Middle Toe'. However, that still leaves two toes unaccounted for. What gems have we come up with for referring to them? What wondrous terms has the English language found for these appendages? 'The One Next To The Big Toe', 'The One Next To The Little Toe'. Priceless.

I find the lack of imagination displayed by today's youth particularly disappointing. When I was a lad, we didn't have computers and PlayStations and had to amuse ourselves by pretending we were Jedi Knights with the aid of a couple of broom handles, or by going to the park and lurking around on the swings until it got dark when we could be 'X-Wing' pilots. These days, the kids are a lot lazier and can't be bothered with all the hassle of thinking, preferring the lure of instant gratification instead. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the disappearance of the ancient rituals of adolescent swearing.
  I feel sorry for the teenagers out there right now effing and blinding without a good run-up. It's all 'fuck you, motherfucker' at the drop of a hat; where's the fun in that? There's no banter. No style. I blame the all those American television shows for this lowering of standards. I want them to bring back the cussing we had in the early Eighties, when you could kick the evening's proceedings off by calling Darren Parkes a 'moon-headed spastic' and crank it up gradually from there. 'Bummer', 'mongoloid', 'dick splash' and 'fanny fart' were all excellent building-blocks that could be combined and re-arranged to form any number of killer combos, until, after a getting yourself off to a shaky start with 'Nob off, Taylor, you big puff', you would find youself ten minutes later effortlessly unleashing such classics as 'Ginger, you fat gaylord pissflap wankstain, your Mom's a fat lezza prozzie and your window-licking Dad sucks dog-shit through a tramp's sock!'
  You see the level of skill and commitment that this Americanisation of our swearing has cost us? You see what we've lost? The art has gone out of it forever. Personally, I still can't figure out why an 'ass' is no longer a small donkey but a description of one's rear. In my day we had 'arseholes'... 

The latest chapter in New Labour's 'Do As I Say, Not As I Do' book illustrates the hypocracy of the party perfectly. While certain of us in the Civil Service are being told to cut back on overtime and are having to piss off on time leaving jobs half-done until the following day, we find that certain MPs with a basic salary of £57,485 are claiming anywhere up to £169,899 per year in 'expenses'.
  A survey by the Daily Express showed that, apart from a solitary member of the Scottish Parliament, the Top Ten expense fiddlers (sorry, claimers) were all Labour MPs. What really gets me is that the only time I made an expense claim this year was for representing my organisation by attending a national conference that I didn't want to go to anyway. I had to pay for two nights accommodation at a fucking Novotel out of my own pocket and then claim it back when I returned. The conference was in May. I was finally reimbursed in October. Perhaps I should've signed the form Billy The Fish MP instead. That way I too might be the owner of five properties like Keith bloody Vaz, instead of rotting away in a rented flat in fucking Streatham.
  There is quite obviously going to be an investigation over these claims, but which do you think it'll be? A Fraud Squad investigation by the Old Bill leading to prosecutions and convictions or an internal inquiry that finds no wrongdoing whatsoever and results in whoever chairs the inquiry getting a Peerage in the next honours list? Answers on a postcard...

I hereby award Channel Four the 'Scraping The Barrel Award For Crap Television' for their monumentally inane series, 'The Salon'. Whoever came up with the idea of people having their hair cut live on telly by Ozzy Osbourne's gay nephew and his fashion-victim friends is either on some serious medication or needs to be.

Why are people still bothering to fit car alarms to their vehicles? Nobody gives a shit when they go off, do they? I mean, when was the last time you heard one blaring and thought 'Shit! That car's being twocked! I'd better ring the Old Bill sharpish!' Doesn't happen, does it?
  These days, we're all fully paid-up members of the 'fuck you' generation, so the only thing that's likely to cross our minds is 'I wish that tosser would turn that thing off, I'm trying to watch telly!'
  Take my advice; get an immobiliser instead. It won't stop the rat-boys, but at least we'll all be able to get some sleep. 

Given the mental dexterity of the average advertising executive, you'd think they'd stay away from using rhetorical questions when advertising junk food to the masses, wouldn't you? Take the latest advert from Kellog's. It runs "What's so good about Kellog's Nutri-Gain bars?"
  Now, a moments reflection in anyone with a brain is going to provide a definitve answer -  'Fuck all'. Probably not the ideal way to push a sugary carbohydrate snack...

What the hell is going on with Television Cameramen? Have you noticed that whenever you see somebody interviewed on telly nowadays, you never get to see their whole head? The cameraman is always in extreme close-up, eyebrow to bottom lip on any poor sod who's talking.
  This was amusing on 'Wayne's World', but that was a decade ago. I don't know what they're being taught at polytechnic (sorry, 'university'), but I ain't impressed.
  Worse, just look what happens when they're given a room to film.They can't resist a left-to-right diagonal pan and turn. Look, you wankers, you're not filming 'Batman', this is regional television and as good as you're ever going to get. So, less of the MTV bollocks, ok? 

Starsky and Hutch' will be the next 70's show to be reheated for Hollywood. We've already been subjected to 'Charlie's Angels', 'The Hulk' and 'Planet of the Apes'. They're even talking about a new 'Dukes of Hazzard' (with straight faces, too!) It's can only be a matter of time before they start strip-mining the 80's for ideas. Hmm, 'Airwolf' and 'The A Team'. Jesus wept, I can hardly wait... 

How many motorway maintenance men does it take to change a lightbulb? Forty-seven. One to change the bulb and forty-six to cone off an entire lane of the fucking motorway for four miles before the actual light. Yes, I know it's not funny. It wasn't funny being stuck in a jam on the M6 from junctions 6 to 10 for an hour and a half, either. The stretch of motorway around Birmingham is in an almost perpetual state of repair, owing to the maintenance contract constantly going to the lowest bidder, who then sub-contracts it down and down until it ends up with Paddy O'Reilly and his brother who'll sort it out for thirty quid, so they will sir. Consequently, we all have to sail slowly past mile after mile of untouched, coned-off road until we get to the handful of grubby dossers in yellow jackets doing the square-root of fuck-all on the hard-shoulder.
  In Japan, when a motorway needs repairing, the maintenance company has it's men working swing shifts 24/7 until the job is complete, which is always is on time and on budget. The reason we don't do this over here is that it would deny Plod the opportunity to plant a few more Gatso's and screw us for £40 for diving three miles an hour over the 40mph roadworks limit. Chance would be a fucking fine thing! I didn't get out of second fucking gear all the way from Fort Dunlop to Wednesbury today. I wouldn't mind if I'd been spoiled by beautiful Highland scenery along the way, but this is the Black Country. Every time Queen Victoria passed through on her way to Balmoral, she used to order the train curtains drawn. That was over a hundred years ago and trust me, things ain't improved!

What a great country we live in. The mother of all parliaments has this week been heatedly debating the most important topic in today's society. Never mind that statistics for violent crime have gone through the roof or that our education system is unable to ensure that a child can spell it's own name by the age of sixteen.
  Never mind that the NHS is collapsing under the weight of middle-management bureaucracy while people slowly rot with MRSA on the wards (or more commonly, the corridors). No, obviously what the people really want is a full on cross-party free-for-all on that most crucial of all issues - fox-hunting. Jesus.
  Still, it will no doubt distract all us plebs from worrying about how we'll be able to feed ourselves come retirement now that Gordon has stolen all the pensions, right Tone?

I'm starting to get really annoyed by all these people I keep seeing wearing ridiculous t-shirts from 'French Connection' . You know, the ones that have 'fcuk' written boldly across the chest. If these people are trying to look dangerous and interesting, then I've got news for you, kiddies - you don't. No one is shocked by them either. All you're doing is making youself look a sda cnut.

Filling in a form at work the other day, and I'm asked to indicate my nationality by ticking the appropriate box. Among the choices were 'White-British', 'White-Irish' and 'White-Other'. Everytime I'm faced with a form like this, I tick 'White-Other' and specify 'English' in the space provided. I'm sick of being labelled as 'British'. Devolution has been and gone and the Welsh are allowed to be Welsh and the Scots, Scots, yet English people are told that we must be British and proud of it. Well, I don't want to be. I want to be English, but I'm not allowed to even voice that thought in Tony's Brave New World as the 'racist' alarms go off. Researching this subject further, I was not at all surprised to learn that the Welsh and Scottish Assemblies still get to have a say in English lawmaking and policies. Why? You've got your own parliaments now, sod off! Funnier still is the fact that the Welsh and Scottish are still getting healthy chunks of English tax-payers money, too. Surely if they were that keen to sever all ties with Westminster, they'd be only too happy to generate their own revenue, wouldn't you think?

If there's one thing I really have no time for, it's religious stereotypes. Being a lapsed atheist, I've spent a lot of time studying comparative religions, and they basically all boil down to the same thing, which is along the lines of  'Everybody Should Be Nice To Everyone Else.' Not the most complicated of starting points, you might think, and yet every faith on the planet seems to insist on putting their own slant on it. The most ridiculous of which is undoubtedly to be found in religious clothing and symbolism. Is it actually written down anywhere in the Koran that in order to be a good Muslim you must wear a long white shift? Does the Talmud insist that you're not a proper Jew unless you are attired in a black coat and funny hat? Of course not, it's merely stereotyping and it's ridiculous.
  Every religion I've studied states that it's Divine Being created Life to be celebrated in all it's infinite variety. Do you really think that any God having gone to all that trouble to show off His creative skills is going to be happy that His followers are all obsessed with looking the bloody same? I think not. The worst culprits have got to be the Christians, though, who insist on using a cross as a symbol of their faith. Should Jesus ever feel inclined to return to us worthless monkeys, how do you think He's going to feel seeing all those constant reminders to an excrutiatingly painful death plastered ecerywhere? I mean, it might just annoy the guy. Is this wise?

So I'm walking around London Euston station with an empty can of fizzy drink looking for somewhere to put it. Spotting a bin, I stroll over only to note that it had been sealed and a notice screwed onto the front which read 'This Bin Is Closed For Security Reasons'.
  Now, you probably all think that this is a protective measure designed to curb the threat of terrorism, but not me. I know Dangermouse's secret hide-out when I see it!

Typical bloody Britain. One sunny/snowy/rainy day and everything goes to rat-shit. It's ninety degrees today and the rail networks are slowing every train down to a crawl because they're afraid the steel in the lines might buckle in the heat, taking a 90mph train down to something like 50 mph.. I reckon we should take a leaf out of some hot nation's book and see how they manage to run a railway in extreme heat. Let's see...how about India? The Indian Rail Network, although frequently overcrowded, always manages to run on it's rails at full speed, despite consistantly hitting temperatures in excess of 110 degrees. We should find the guys who designed and built India's network and get them to revamp ours. Not a bad idea, until you realise that it was British engineers using British steel who put India's rail superstructure into place and yet we can't seem to get it together in the nation that gave birth to the bloody railway in the first place. Good here, innit?

The way I see it, old Gordon Brown has a bit of a problem on his hands. Because of his creative accounting (read: 'theft'), most of us will have to keep working until we're eligible for a telegram from Her Maj because there's no money left in the pot to pay us a pension. A quandary for any Chancellor, I'm sure you'll agree.
  Now, not that I wish to help the fat Scottish highwayman out of his predicament or anything, but it occurs to me that there's a very cheap and simple way out of this corner he's painted himself into. Have the Government nationalise Gregg's Bakeries. Think about it; If the State were to take over every Gregg's in every high street up and down the land, they could distribute free cakes and pasties to anyone who walked in off the street. A few years of this and the chance of anyone living to retirement age will have plummeted.
  Of course, since this will chiefly affect the unemployed (they have a lot more shopping time on their hands), Gordon may feel a tad uncomfortable about targeting key Labour voters in this way. Then again, he can easily readdress the balance by subsidising all the remaining Civil Service canteens and having them provide free fry-ups every morning. That way, in just a few short years, he will have created the ideal Chancellor's society. Everybody fat and happy while they're working and dead before they become a financial burden.
  Hurrah! Mine's a Steak Bake... 

Currently leading my list of People Who Need A Good Kicking is whoever it is that insists on sticking a dozen leaflets in the middle of every magazine that I ever buy. They're always the same bloody companies, too. It's either 'Britannia Music' offering you any album you like as long as it's in the Top 20, or it's 'MBNA Credit Card' wanting to lend you money you haven't got to buy things you don't want. It smacks of low-budget desperation somehow, don't you think? I mean, if these firms wanted your custom that badly, they'd advertise on TV or radio like other companies.

Went on the London Eye the other day. Christ, where to start...?
  Ok, firstly, it's owned by British Airways, which means that the first thing you do is follow one of those annoying roped-off switchback queues until you get to the counter where you can purchase the £11 ticket for your 'flight'. If you got together with a few friends and booked a car to yourselves, you can wait in the 'departure lounge' prior to 'embarking' (I'm not making this up.)
  Next, you get offered a travel pack for £6, which consists of a plastic bag containing a flimsy pamphlet and a bag of Smarties.
  Finally, you have the option of purchasing a sight-seer's guide to maximise the experience of your thirty-minute flight - cost? A fiver to you, squire. While you're up there, revelling in the total lack of sensation that only a really slow ride on a oversized ferris-wheel can give, they take your photograph which you can purchase when you 'disembark' for a further £7.
  So there you have it, the best part of thirty quid for what is easily the most underwhelming half-hour of entertainment that London has to offer.
  I could've had more fun in a cat-litter.

For the life of me, I can never understand those people you see on trains who start queueing up by the door ten minutes before the train pulls into the station. Where do they think they're going?
  The West-Coast run into London Euston has the worst culprits. As soon as we've passed Wembley, two-dozen arseholes suddenly leap up and shuffle toward the doors. We're still six miles out, you gibbons, sit down and give your brains a rest!
  I've found a way to annoy these idiots, though, what I do is sit in the nearest doorway with all my bags on the floor around me reading 'Viz' until the train comes to a complete stop. Then, and only then, do I get up and calmly stuff the magazine into my bag before slowly opening the door and stepping out.
  Honestly, if I had a quid for every 'tut' I've heard...

I nearly got wiped out on a pedestrian crossing today by a cyclist. This isn't the first time this has happened, either. There I stood, patiently waiting until the lights went red and the green man started to bleep. I stepped out, and from nowhere some lycra-clad wanker with his head stuck in a bowling-ball goes flying past my nose at 30mph.
  These guys are a fucking menace and should be made to pay road-tax and insurance like the rest of us. A nominal charge of £10 a year would encourage all cyclists to be a bit more responsible (although any grown man who chooses to wear lycra should be made to pay at least triple that on general principle, the sad bastard.)

Twenty-five years ago we had Morecambe and Wise. Ten years ago we had Reeves and Mortimer. Today, it's Ant and Dec. Comic geniuses to Geordie glove-puppets in only a quarter of a century...

Dancing. Why? What is it in some people's genetic make-up that makes them want to jerk their arms and legs about in a random fashion when they hear a piece of music? I'm not talking about dancing with your partner to a slow, seductive waltz or a sizzling tango. This is perfectly acceptable and we could all do with more of it. No, I'm talking about standing two inches away from another sweaty idiot at two in the morning and acting like an epileptic with his dick in the mains in the hope that the blonde piece in the corner will see you for the stud you are and want your body.Women are quite happy to dance alone or with other women because they are naturally more graceful than men and can pull off dancing without looking stupid. Men only ever attempt it if they are either gay or drunk, neither of which is going to impress the ladies. Stay at the bar, gentlemen. Preserve your dignity.

Why do shops still insist on the ridiculous practice of pricing things at '£something .99'? Is there anything weirder than handing over a nice, crispy note and getting a penny back? It gets worse when the word 'only' is involved, as they have no idea of when to stop. 'Only £9.99' is viable, but when you see cars advertised as 'Only £19,999', we're getting into the realms of urine extraction. Stop insulting my intelligence and let's call it twenty grand. You can keep the change...

I tried valiantly to watch a game of American Football the other day, but had to give up after two and a half hours as I was bored shitless. How this pantomime attracts the gates that it does is beyond me, yet the Yanks love it. It must be one of those things that simply doesn't work on this side of the Atlantic, like iced coffee or Adam Sandler. In American Football, each side has two teams, one for when they're attacking and another for when they defend. They can call 'time-outs' and stop the play to discuss tactics, they all wear huge body armour and helmets and they are absolutely obsessed by figures and data. Reams of numbers were regularly flashed up on the screen telling me how many yards of possession each bloke had made, how many passes he'd received, along with his height, weight, college and for all I know, sexual history. Yet, each time we try and sell them on the idea of real football (you can stick the term 'soccer' up your 'ass'), they turn round and tell us they don't get it. Bizarre. This is not the only example of the weird American taste in sport, they also have Baseball (though to be fair, us Brits do occasionally play this provided we are a) female and b) under twelve - it's called 'rounders'.) Then there's Basketball, where every single match ends with a score like 112 - 113 because it's played like this: Slap, slap, slap, dunk - Blues score. Slap, slap, slap, dunk - Reds score (repeat for an hour.) The ultimate in pointless American sports though, has got to be NASCAR, where they take a bunch of insanely powerful supercharged cars and race them. Round and round in a circle. A lot. Yawn. It would be easy to conclude from this that all American sports are crap until you remember that they did give us Foxy Boxing and Topless Beach Volleyball. Good old Uncle Sam!

I'm really getting to hate all of those bastards who insist on owning a sodding great four-litre 4x4 when they live in the middle of a city. What in God's name do they think they're playing at? What possible use do they have for variable transmission, apart from making a quick getaway from their kid's school in the next street after they've dropped them off. And I bet they're really grateful for those huge great tyres when they have to mount the kerb to get their fat arses two paces nearer to the fucking cashpoint, aren't they? As for those bull bars on the front; well, when that rogue wildebeest thunders toward them down Chiswick High Street, at least they'll know that the collision damage on their metallic paint will be kept to a minimum. Finally, a special note to those with the top of the range model with the winch on the front. Why not use it to see if you can pull your head out of your arse, you twat. 

Seeing John Lydon back in the limelight has made me realise what it is that is wrong with the youth of today. They're not rebelling against anything. They have no opinions. They don't watch the news or do anything other than just sit there happily being spoon-fed whatever crap MTV chooses to push their way. We have a nation of bland, beige teenagers who think that five miming pretty-boys dancing to a backing tape constitutes a band. Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming the kids - the music is still there for them in bands like The Offspring and Green Day, it's just that the global multi-corporations who own the majority of the record companies prefer to stick to a formula they know and carry on pushing it. I just know I'm going to be having a bizarre conversation with my daughter fifteen years from now that'll be the exact opposite of the'turn that racket down' one that my generation had. I can just hear myself yelling at her to play something - anything -with a guitar in it, or get up and go and demonstrate against something.  It'll be 'Leave me alone, Dad, I'm on my PlayStation 5!' ic!

I can't believe those ridiculous car adverts that I keep reading in the national press. The ones that offer you a brand new Ford or whatever and print in huge letters 'Only £199 a month for 36 months!' You then read the small print and find you have to stick two grand down before you start, not to mention the 'guaranteed future value of £5000' bit, which basically stings you for half the value of the car at the end. Unbelievably, people are queuing up to take advantage of this con-trick. Why don't the car companies take this charade to its logical conclusion? 'Only £5000 down and 1p a week for three years plus a guaranteed future value of £5000!' Or better still 'Only £10000 down and nothing else to pay - ever!' 

Just how stupid can you get. British holiday-maker Samantha Marson, 21, is now facing six months in a U.S. jail for telling Miami airport officials she had three bombs in her bag. What an idiot! If she was that desperate for an invasive cavity search, I have several mates that would've been only too pleased to give her the old 'vet's handshake'. They'd even have bought her a drink beforehand, too... 

My organisation is toying with the idea of decking all us proles out in corporate clothing. I had a look at some of the samples today, and were I the type to be easily impressed by blue nylon and chunky knitwear, then I would've thought all my Christmases had come at once. Sadly though, I got as far as the sewn-on logo identifying precisely who my employer is, complete with our embarrassingly naff corporate buzz-phrase before apathy got the better of me...

At the risk of using this column to actually make a point; allow me to offer my view on the current University Tuition Fee debacle. Why not give a grant to those students who want to study something worthwhile that they can make a career out of and let the dossers finance themselves? Anyone reading Medicine, Law, Engineering etc. where they will actually be contributing to society at the end of it should be paid to study and fulfill their potential. Those loafing right-on wankers doing Sociology, Aromatherapy or fucking Media Studies can fork out for their own non-degree themselves or get Daddy to pay for it. Everyone with me? Good. Sorted. Off to the subsidised Student Union bar, then. 

The latest promotion from Cadbury's is an absolute corker. The 'Get Active' programme aims to increase fitness in schoolchildren by allowing them to collect tokens which they can redeem for sporting equipment. Guess where they get the tokens from? Yep, on the chocolate wrappers. Better than that, any school wishing to take part in this promotion has to collect a minimum of 750 tokens before they can make a claim. So after the little porkers have munched their way through three hundred quids worth of sugary crap, their teacher can send off for a bunch of skipping ropes that they'll all be too fat to use. Class

Talking of cars, the new Mini is available in a British Racing Green option, which is somewhat amusing for a small German car, but there you go. The only problem is that a certain branch of estate agents in West London have taken to embellishing this by painting yellow 'flames' and an individual 'racing number' on the sides. I saw three of these in the same road in Chiswick last week, which was bad enough, but the prize went to the guy - presumably the 'team leader' - who'd topped his off with a personalised registration. Now I can just see the attraction of having a personalised registration if you are rich enough to afford one that works, like 'DAV 1D' or 'B1 LLY', but when all your budget can stretch to is the likes of  'H3 COL', and that on a company car, then you really are one sad individual.

Summer's here and predictably, out come the cabriolets. I've never understood how a vehicle containing half the seats and equipped with a cloth roof can cost twice as much as a proper car, but I suppose it's a matter of taste. However, I am totally at a loss to explain the popularity of the so-called 'Smart' car. What's so smart about driving around in an underpowered motorised pram? You look a complete pipe and you've paid eight grand for the priviledge of doing so...

Richard Branson wants to buy up British Airways' fleet of Concordes and run them as Virgin's trans-atlantic flagship service. Given the total chimp's fist that the bloke made of this country's rail network, I for one am looking forward to hearing the tannoys at Heathrow in the future..."Virgin Airlines would like to announce that the 11-15 to New York is running approximately three hours late and will today be re-routed via Rugby due to over-running engineering work in the Milton Keynes area. We apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause to your journey."

Every time I think that the pseudo-Socialist numpties running this country, and, more specifically, my organisation, can't possibly get any more vacuous and inane, they manage to pull something extra out of the bag and surprise me. We were all informed today of a new 'multi-faith and contemplation room' available for our use, should we require a bit of a skive, sorry, 'thoughtful meditation space'. Apparently, the room was the brain-child of a collaboration between our 'Diversity and Citizen Focus Directorate' and (and I promise, I'm not making this up) 'S.A.M.U.R.A.I' (Support Associations Meeting Up Regularly And Interacting). I honestly have no idea whether the group or the acronym came first, but fair play to them. If you're going to take the piss, at least do it with style. You know, I honestly believe that, rather than cringing with shame and embarrassment when this new area was opened (we called them 'Common Rooms' in my day), the people behind it actually would've sat there with a warm glow of self-righteous smugness. S.A.M.U.R.A.I. For fuck's sake. It's times like these that I'm actually glad that the economy is collapsing, as over-promoted, under-achieving project co-ordinators such as the idiots behind this venture are traditionally the first to get handed their P45s. I for one will happily sit in the Balham soup-kitchen behind one of these dobbers in five years time, ripping the piss out of them. Perhaps they can come up with a trendy acronym for their new group? How about T.U.R.B.O.T.S. (Totally Unemployable Retarded Buffoons On The Skids)? Works for me.

You know what I really hate? People who insist on wearing their work ID round their neck on a chain while they're on their lunch break. Every day in the sandwich shop, you can see them all queueing up with their name-tags on display like a row of smug Paddington Bears. Tuck them in your pockets, you tossers, No-one cares who you are or who you work for!

Woodpigeons. I have one of these moaning, asthematic little bastards living in a tree outside my bedroom window and every morning at five o'clock it treats me to a stirring rendition of it's timeless classic - 'Hoo HOO hoo' - until I get so jacked-off with it that I have to get up and put the kettle on. Now, the old lady over the road from my mom used to have a budgie that could whistle, sing and shout 'Pretty Joey' and even 'Pissbag!' which is much more impressive I'm sure you'll agree. What's more, it was only about a quarter of the size of the feathered prat in my garden, so it is with this thought in mind that I have decided to give Woody precisely one week to learn a new repertoire or it's Webley time.

The actor's union, Equity, is probably one of the most elitist (not to mention stroppiest) on the planet. You or I are allowed to have a 'walk-on' part in a TV programme, but if we want to speak, we have to belong to Equity. However, to even be considered for Equity, you have to have spent a considerable (and quantifiable) amount of time doing all sorts of stuff like street theatre, amateur dramatics, busking etc, until you finally get accepted and receive the Holy Grail of membership. So it always makes me laugh when I see Children's TV characters like the Teletubbies or the Fimbles, because inside each one of these seven-foot fluffy costumes is a 'serious' actor who has struggled for years to earn the right to make a complete dick of himself on national telly.

Crufts 2004 was won by a whippet, which is fair enough; it's a proper dog as opposed to one of those hairy, squash-faced yapper-type rodent things that tend to win dog-shows. Yet, typically, the poor animal has been cursed with a twat for an owner, who thought nothing of inflicting the monicker 'Cobyco Call The Tune' on the unfortunate creature. The proud winner, cursed with the equally ridiculous name of Lynne Yacoby-Wright (you all know my thoughts on double-barrelled names) confessed that the win wouldn't be changing either the dog or her. "She'll still sleep with her Mummy", the idiot woman trilled. One can only pray that she hasn't got children of her own...

I have this theory which I have honed from years of conversations with my friend Brian and it's this - 'Everyone Called Brian Is A Cock'. Now many long and animated hours have been spent trying to knock a hole in this argument and so far, it has been impossible to do so. The fact is, you simply cannot name me a Brian who isn't a cock. Brian Clough? Cock. Brian Ferry? Greasy cock. Brian Brown? Aussie cock. Brian Blessed? Shouty cock. Brian Conley? Smug, unfunny cock. Even the actor is called Brian Cox (bit of a giveaway, there.) The theory really comes together when you consider that Marilyn Manson was actually born Brian Warner. All hail the Shock Rock cock.

OK, so I'm back on 'celebrities' again. Have you noticed the amount of award ceremonies that these wasters attend during the year? They just can't resist the opportunity to congratulate each other on the results of their latest fortnight's work, can they? As an actor, you have Cannes, the BAFTAs, the Oscars (if you're lucky), the Emmys, the Sundance festival; not to mention any number of local magazine and newspaper awards. If you're a singer, you have the Q awards, the Ivor Novello's, the Grammys, the Brits and various dross like the Smash Hits winners awards, etc. Now, given that most of the 'stars' on the circuit these days tend to knock out the obligatory single as soon as they've had their face on the telly, chances are you'll see the same china grins turning up at every award ceremony going. Just how do they find the time to stay true to their chosen muses and maintain a suitable level of professional input into their work? How do they ensure that enough time is spent keeping the quality of television and film at it's current level? I mean, God help us if treats like the last 'Westlife' album or 'Men In Black 2' are denied to future audiences simply because everybody's too busy kissing each other's arses.

I was all set to have a go at the poor quality of cartoons on TV these days. I had this really cool argument ready in which I compared and contrasted the animation of stuff like 'Scooby Doo' that I used to be glued to in the Seventies with the rushed still-frame-with-flickering-mouth Japanimation that the poor tykes are forced to endure today. I was really up for a rant here, 'Pokemon' was in my sights...and then I remembered we used to have 'Roobarb'. Oh dear...

So if you'd read that Antiques Roadshow was rolling up at your local town hall next week, what would you take along? Grandpa's old watch, perhaps? The Victorian porcelain doll that Great Aunt Petunia left you?
  Or would you decide to drag along a seven-foot-high mahogony kitchen dresser like the idiot I watched last week? I mean, what must've been going through his head, for God's sake? What did his wife say? 'Why don't you take your old Meccano set, dear, you've had it since 1933?' 'No, love, I'll think I'll pop along with half the fucking kitchen wall - see what they reckon it's worth'.
  This clown even managed to look pleased with himself when they told him it was a reproduction piece from the Twenties and was only worth around £800. It must've cost him that to get the bloody thing to the venue!

Given that the majority of women fall into the size 12-16 bracket, why is it that every single designer in the fashion industry chooses to exhibit their 'creations' on six-foot androgynous skeletons weighing five stone, tops. I say 'creations' because these ridiculous wisps of silk bear little relation to actual clothing. What planet are these people on? Haven't they heard of economics? I mean, if I suddenly had a real jones-on to join the rag trade, you can bet that I'd want to coin in as much wedge as I could before the bubble burst. I'd have the Caroline Quentin Summer Collection knocked out in double-quick time and then sit back and start counting the shekels. All this sodding about with anorexic stick-insects just isn't going to pay the rent, is it? When was the last time you saw a woman strolling down the high street wearing a three-foot conical hat and baring a breast? Exactly.

...and while we're on the subject, why is it that famous people only ever seem to hang around with other famous people? Is it some sort of mutual saprophytic feeding ritual; taking sustenance from each other's popularity? Or is it that the only 'real' people they ever meet are fans gushing about how great they are? I suspect it's a bit of both. I therefore feel it is my duty as an altruist and all-round top geezer to offer my services as the world's first official Celebrity's Mate. Any celebrity needing to talk to someone in the outside world who can be guaranteed not to give a rat's arse about their latest 'project' or what labels they're wearing is invited to get in touch with me via the guest book. We'll have a chat over a beer or two and go for a curry afterwards. Heads will gradually be removed from rectums and life will again be put into perspective. This generous offer is open to absolutely any famous person with the sole exception of Winona Ryder.

What is this national obsession with celebrity? I can under stand (vaguely) why one might hang around for half an hour or so to get the autograph of, say, Sean Connery, but when you have people queuing halfway round HMV to scream at a bunch of manufactured numptys that were only created two weeks ago and will be gone by Christmas, then I think it's time this nation had a good long look at itself. I mean, the whole notion of celebrity...it used to be that to become a celebrity, one had to be in films, regularly appear on a popular programme or front a successful band. Nowadays, you just have to have been on TV in order to secure your fifteen minutes. Look at the latest series of  'I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here' and tell me you haven't looked at at least two of them and asked yourself, "Who the fuck are you?"  Thing is though, it doesn't matter, does it? You'll watch it just the same because it's on and if you didn't watch, you'd have to do something weird like actually talk to your partner or play with your kids. But then, like the great Paul Weller once said, 'The public want what the public get.'  What do you mean, who's Paul Weller?  Go on, get back to your telly before you start thinking...

There is an advert on telly at the moment featuring all the characters from the old children's programme Hector's House. There I was, halfway through 'Frasier' and up pops Hector and proceeds to try and flog me a fucking mortgage! How dare he presume that, simply because he and I were fairly tight in my formative years he can just appear out of the blue, twenty-odd years later and prostitute himself as a financial guru. Like I'm going to trust his mortgage advice...the guy lives next door to a frog.

The only reason why anyone should possess a double-barrelled name is to save the rest of us valuable arsehole-spotting time.

Now that Herself and I have spawned; thereby becoming a 'family', I was told by the Health Visitor that we would be eligible for some sort of benefit. A quick check of the Internet revealed that we are entitled to claim 'Child Benefit', Child Tax Credit and 'Working Tax  Credit'. The website blurb stated that 'it's money with your name on it' and 'nine out of ten families with are eligible'. There were loads of other benefits and tax credits, too, covering virtually everyone in the country. So let me get this right; there's this massive organisation called the Inland Revenue that every month takes a huge chunk of everybody's wages and then gives everybody a smaller chunk back. 
  Now, I might be missing the point here, but wouldn't it make more sense to take a little bit less out of everyone's payslips? That way there would be no need to employ thousands of civil servants to take our money off us only to give it back under another name and we might all be able to live on what we actually earn.
  Or am I just being childishly simplistic?

I don't have a problem with thirteen year old girls from council estates getting pregnant so long I don't have to pay for them. In an idea world, we should be forcibly spaying these children the moment they give birth. How many times have we seen one of these pathetic little specimens standing by their 'oh-so-proud' unemployed thirty-year old mum and forty-five-year old granny with a Marlboro on the go cooing about how marvellous they think the whole idea of lumbering the idiot tax-payer with another pointless mouth to feed is? No, I say sterilise them and then we can let them get on with their shabby little Gregg's-eating existence safe in the knowledge that we won't have to shell out again in another twelve months when their alcopop-fuelled shagging produces another future ASBO case. I mean, it's not as if these kids are going to grow up to discover a cure for cancer or colonise Mars, is it? Look at the genetic material the fuckers are working with, for a start. Thirteen year old chav-scum mum; fifteen year old joyrider dad (no doubt with another three kids by another three brainless brood-mares.) These things are a biological dead-end, aren't they? A modern-day equivalent to the Neanderthal - vaguely human in appearance, but not equipped with the same tools as it's smarter human cousins.  It's a shame, but hey, if you mate a rodent with another rodent, it doesn't produce a thoroughbred race-horse, does it? No, it produces yet another rodent and personally, I reckon the rat-bank is just about full now, so some sort of population-control is the only way forward. It's either that or culling.
  And if you think this is a bit harsh, you should've read the first draft when I was really fired up. At least I've now come round to the idea of letting Chantelle-Marie keep her ratspawn and not having the doctors take it away to use as an organ bank for real people...

Fast food. Anyone who knows me will know my opinion of 'McBurger's' and it's ilk - namely, that it's cheaper and more nutritious to eat your money - however, stranded out on an all-night job recently, I was forced to frequent one of these places for breakfast. After waiting for five minutes in the queue (fast food?), young Johnny No-Stars asked for my order. I decided on a Sausage Muffin (I refuse to ask for a 'Mc' anything), a coffee and a hash brown. I got a Bacon Muffin, an orange juice and a hash brown. Three items ordered, one correct. I mean, it's not rocket science, is it? Next time I work late, I'm taking sandwiches...

I'm going for promotion at work, except that it isn't a promotion in the sense that there is more money in it. It's a 're-apply for your own job with more responsibilities and a different title' type of promotion instead.
  Basically, I've got to sit down and write out over half a dozen sheets of A4 explaining why I think I am suited to do the job I've been doing for the last decade - a job, incidentally, that wouldn't even exist were it not for the hard-work and dedication that my colleagues and I have put in over the years.
  So, I'll spend three or four days typing out reams of paperwork which will end up on the desk of some drone from Personnel who doesn't know the first thing about the work I do. This person will then solomnly read through my submission without understanding any of the technical terms in it before deciding whether or not to 'promote' me.
  And the management have the audacity to wonder why the morale is so low in the department...

Why do television news reporters assume that standing outside No.10 Downing Street at half past ten at night will automatically lend credence to their report on whatever it was that Tony has done today?
  I'm more likely to believe the guy who's got the sense to talk to me from a nice warm studio than the dobber who's standing out there in the pissing rain getting a soaking. 

I've honked at the state of Saturday night television before, but there was a truly worrying development in the paper today. Apparently, the viewing figures are so appallingly awful for dross like 'Pop Idol', 'Fame Academy', 'Ant & Dec' etc, that the powers that be are actually considering bringing the sinister Michael Barrymore back to our screens.
  Jesus, what's next? No, wait, let me guess...Noel fucking Edmonds. 

As you are all aware, this site delights in proving just how much society is dumbing down as we claw our way ever further into this new century. Even so, occasionally, things still have the capacity to surprise me with their sheer mind-numbing stupidity.
 Take the combination of driving snacks I purchased today, namely a carton of pure orange juice and a packet of peanuts. That the juice was pointlessly marked with a 'V' symbol, thus assuring any vegetarians of the total lack of gravy within the carton, I could just about handle.
  The peanut packet being labelled with 'contains peanuts', however, required a double-take before I could actually believe it. 

I love the way the makers of 'Sunny Delight' are promoting their new 'no added sugar' variety as some kind of healthy alternative. Ok, so there's no added 'sugar', but the glucose, fructose, cellulose and vegetable oil are all present and correct, along with all the flavourings, colourings, preservatives and 'E'-numbers.
  This stuff sells well because it has an nice orangey taste and contains vitamin 'C'. Hey, kids, so does an orange! An orange also contains more that 2% orange juice, too...
  It's worth noting that the same company who makes it is also responsible for 'Pringles'. Then again, seeing as the company is 'Proctor and Gamble', it might be worth remembering that they make 'Bold' and 'Head and Shoulders' as well. 

Take a look at the TV guides that come with your Sunday papers and they'll tell you exactly what will happen in the soap of your choice for the coming week, thus removing any reason to watch it.
  The same thing occurs on the rare occasions when someone wins the jackpot on 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?'  The tabloids (and increasingly, the broadsheets too) delight in letting us know that so-and-so from Surrey copped the big one last night, so tune in on Saturday to see for yourself.
  Why have they started doing this? What possible purpose does it serve, other than to spoil the enjoyment of anyone watching?
  I used to have a mate like this at school and I remember watching 'Jaws' for the first time on his video. My fledgeling eleven-year-old imagination was in overdrive; I was totally hooked on every suspenseful moment up to the point where Dominic leans over and whispers, "You'll like this bit...it's where his head pops out of the boat!" Little git. 

The Germans call it 'schadenfreude' - taking a perverse delight in the misfortune of others - and it's the only reason that I'm able to tolerate some of these reality TV shows that we're constantly being bombarded with.
  My favourite at the moment is 'Changing Rooms'. I love seeing the expression on some poor bastard's face when he finds out that Lawrence Llewellyn-Bell-End has painted his living-room pink and stapled up his curtains.
  If only they would combine it with 'Ground Force', it would be perfect. Just imagine if, after turning the guy's house into a knocking shop, they then take him outside and confront him with the fact that Charlie Dimmock has fucked up his garden as well...

Channel Four are at a loss to explain why the viewing figures for their latest series of 'Big Brother' are so low. Could it be that the bubble has finally burst for reality television? Has the public finally wised up to the fact that watching twelve fuckwits locked in a room every night is not actually entertainment?
  Or is it simply that it's all been done before. Three times. Whatever the reason, it won't stop 'Big Brother 5' from hitting your screens next year. I say your screens; there's no way I'll ever have that shite on my telly! 

Memo to any editors of daily tabloid newspapers that may have dropped in. You know this whole 'Jordan vs. Jodie' thing you insist on printing every single day, yeah?
  Two words for you, guys - Nobody and Cares. 

I'm thinking about getting a new mobile phone but nothing prepared me for the vast array of technical wizardry available out there. Given that the sole criteria employed when purchasing my current phone was 'can I get a Lara Croft cover for it?', I was amazed to be confronted with built-in cameras, colour screens and Space Invaders.
  I was really getting carried away with it until the reality-check kicked in. Hang on, this is a phone. It will sit in my pocket and I will occasionally talk to people on it - end of story. If I want to take pictures I'll bring my camera; and as for a colour screen - pretty, but ultimately pointless, like stained glass windows or Kelly Brook.
  Two-hundred ringtones and downloadable tunes? Excuse me, but I want my phone to go 'ring, ring' in order to attract my attention, not give me a piss-poor, tinny rendition of Britney's latest offering. Where is this techno-juggling going to end? Can we look forward to phones with built-in shavers for the hurried businessman? Thin, vibrating phones for the bored housewife? I was about to share this wisdom with my fellow customers in the Carphone Whorehouse, but the salesman had this look in his eye, so I left. And could I find one of these pocket miracles with a Lara Croft cover? Could I bollocks... 
  (Alright, so I liked the Space Invaders idea.)

On any given Saturday in the centre of Wolverhampton, you will find a guy with a megaphone  giving it large about Jesus. Now, I'm still a bit vague on the whole religion thing, but I feel that if there is a God, He really ought to rethink His whole recruitment strategy.  I don't know about you, but a shouty mentalist standing fifteen feet from the Ann Summers window display and thumping his Bible is not going to do an awful lot to turn me on to the Word. The water into wine gig...now that was a winner!

I've just had this really great idea! Suppose we got half a dozen tolerably attractive women and formed them into a band? We could find some old disco tune and get them all to sing it at exactly the same pitch (harmonies are like, so last century), then we could add a pumping drum n' bass backing track and get some homie to lay down a rap in the middle.
  Best of all though, what if all the girls performed the same dance routine while they sang! Cool, eh? I'm telling you, this could really take off...

News At Ten, the once-mighty ITN flagship has succumbed to the dumbing-down process in the last few years. We used to get given the news in descending order of importance before old Reggie Bosanquet would sign off with a swimming cat or some other light-hearted tosh. Now it's all 'coming up next...' and 'still to come tonight...'. Stop giving us these half-arsed trailers and get on with telling us the day's events and then once you've told  us, go away. None of this 'and the main points of the news again...' shit, thank-you very much. You told me already. Ten minutes ago. I have a memory, I can process information. The worst crime however, is when they slip in some celebrity stuff and trying to sell it to me as important. I don't care what dress Kate Winslet wore to last night's premiere. I couldn't give a toss if Kate Winslet was strolling naked through my living room and...hang on, I think I've spotted a flaw in this argument.

St. George's Day 2003 - the Patron Saint of England, and nobody gave a toss. Except your humble narrator, who was rather resplendant in his white shirt with the huge red cross on. Isn't it strange though, that on St. Patrick's Day you can dye your hair green, wear an Irish flag draped over you shoulders and drink Guinness until you fall over and you're 'enjoying the craic'. Wear a white shirt with a red cross on St. George's Day and you're a racist Nazi. Funny old world, innit?