TEN COMMANDMENTS (FROM MAN TO WOMAN)

The ten commandments from man
Given to woman
Through the inspiration of I, Prince Buster

One,
Thou shall have no other man but me

Two,
Though shall not encourage no man to make love to you
Neither kiss or caress you
For I am your man, a very jealous man
And is ready to lay low any other man who may intrude on our love

Three,
Remember to kiss and caress me
Honor and obey me, in my every whim and fancy
Seven days a week and twice on Sundays
Because at no time will I ever be tired 0f I-T “it”

Four,
Honor my name, so that every other woman may honor it also

Five,
Thou shall not provoke me to anger
Or my wrath will descend upon you heavily

Commandment Six,
Thou shall not search my pockets at night
Or annoy me with your hearsays

Commandment Seven,
Thou shall not shout my name in the streets
If I am walking with another woman
But wait intelligently until I come home
Then we can both have it out decently
For I am your man, a funny man
And detest a scandal in public places

Commandment Eight,
Thou shall not drink, or smoke
Nor use profane language
For those bad habits I will not stand for

Nine,
Thou shall not commit adultery
For the world will not hold me guilty if I commit murder

Ten,
Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s dress
Nor her shoes, nor her bureau, nor her bed, nor her hat
Nor anything that’s hers
Neither shall thou call my attention to anything that may be for sale
In any stores, for I will not give thee anything
But what you actually need for your purpose

These are the ten commandments from man
Given to woman
By me, Prince Buster

I’M NOT SURE WHY…

but i think it’s funny. as i delve deeper into ska i find things like this really amusing. it’s the most offensive thing that i can imagine. worse than me when i start going off on one. but i do really think it’s funny. i love ska music and i can’t help but feel amused by the deeply horrible lyrics. the tunes are so happy and beaty but the sentiments. oh dear.

i was going to blog about my toilet troubles (yet again) because it is one thing that ‘leaves me sorely vexed’.

but i won’t.

visit the 24hr record dealer and check out prince buster. what a mad world. horrific but great.

on that note i shall go and set sail for guildford and see you later…

“twice on sundays” oh ha ha ha ha ha.

*puts on pirate hat and goes out the door*

this is the joke that got viv stanshall the sack.

when he was guesting on radio 1 on the john peel slot he was not considered well because he wrote the show about ten mins before going live on the air.

he used to do jokes along the lines of:
got problems with rhinoceruses? you need ‘rhi NO’
got a problem with bees? you need ‘bee gone’
i think he did the joke about got a problem with being mugged? you need ‘mugger off’
and then he he did the duck joke.

ah well. god bless him. he died far too soon and horribly too.

anyway, i spoke to even sillier simon today. you remember him. he had a boat, the ‘wey tamarisk’. well he hasn’t got it any more; he’s sold it. now he’s down at guildford and looking after his mum who is not at all well so tomorrow the charley rose sets sail upstream and we shall go to see him.

all the people i know are like me. like john the bosh, vodka mick, captain lush, all bloody nuisances who drink too much but are actually a great laugh and far more clever than you might think to look at. sillier simon is in this category. when he’s not actually swimming about in the cut trying to get weill’s disease he is really quite a good bloke.

i really like INTERESTING people. i love to talk to people in pubs and just about anywhere else. i just love people.

anyone is interesting if you talk to them. even right bastards are interesting. i expect even bliar might be interesting if i spoke to him but i would feel a strong temptation to tell him to

DUCK OFF!!!

a certain friend of mine, let’s call him’ simon goodway’ for the sake of anonymity, had been having a bit of trouble with a story he was trying to write. now i owe mr smion woodgay bigtime for things that he has done for me. so it would have been a real bad thing of me to neglect him when he was trying to write his rubbish story. sorry, i mean when he was trying to write his really great and fantastic story…

but what happened was that he started asking loads of questions that he couldn’t be arsed to google and then he ignored my fab suggestions.

it’s a well known fact that most people want to read a story about a goat what invents a new colour. so i told ’smion’ this but crisp fivers came there none.

so, quick as a bee, i came back with my next brilliant idea. my next idea was this: ‘what about some happy cakes that learn how to sing’? i think that happy, singing cakes would be great.

did mr selfish agree? did he frying pan. so i’m going to keep all my good ideas to myself from now on. everyone who has heard about the happy singing cakes thinks it’s the most brilliant idea what they have ever heard of in their whole lives but i know that a selfish idea-thief will be around soon to nick it.

i’m getting right fed up with going round having good ideas for other people.

tchoh!

what’s he doing up there?

there is someone in a flat either upstairs (the creeper) or to the side (dope-smoking bloke) or possibly downstairs who is doing something with a hammer. i can’t think of anything that would take that much hammering. whoever it is has been at it all day. hammering. nothing needs that much hammering unless he or she is a coppersmith and making trays for the tourist trade or a farrier has opened up a smithy or (more likely) a fucking idiot is trying to put some kitchen cabinets together and up on a wall. all day long bloody hammering.

well, they are not the only person with a hammer. i went and got mine from the tool-box at half past five. the floor above me (the creeper’s floor) is made of wood. mine however is of concrete. i joined in in a kind of impromptu bongo jam session kicking in with off-beat paradiddles and the like whenever whoever it was started up. within ten minutes victory was mine. so ha ha ha.

i value my peace and quiet above pretty much all else. i will not tolerate noise. i try not to noise the neighbours up and i don’t want it off them. so, a small triumph for the day.

the poopoo saga continues. even in a bloody nuclear war you get a four minute warning but i don’t. i get about a twenty second warning before the inevitable detonation and lethal mushroom cloud. i’m starting to get seriously fucked off with it all. this morning i went to the loo and then, a bit later, after it had stopped raining i decided to whizz to tesco to get some supplies of the rocket fuel nature. i have to have it because i’m an addict and if i don’t get enough i will start fitting. so, no choice and off i went…

yes there are toilets at tesco but i didn’t need one at the time. on the way back it became a different story. this condition is ruining my life and will make me more agoraphobic than i was before. door kicked in and shopping thrown down and frantic scrabbling at trousers later… you get the picture.

sorry to go on about my bowels so much but this is my blog and my alimentary canal is causing me a lot of grief at the moment.

i bought three fresh sardines and grilled them whole with some oil and lemon and pepper and i had some pizza with some fresh chillis added. i’m eating a lot better these recent days. i wasn’t eating at all for a while.

then the doorbell went and it was a fairly well pissed-up vodka mick swaying about on the doormat. i invited him in and gave him a swig and we talked for a bit but he kept repeating himself and in the end i lied and said i was going to go to bed because i didn’t feel well. off he went.

the radio play that he had interrupted had finished and i was bored. a bit of reading didn’t fix it.

trouty is in london for the while and my arse is broken. just one of those days i suppose. but on the plus side i did have some fun with my 16oz claw hammer.

best i get back on the charley rose tomorrow before i go right round the twist.

sleep well.

i’ve been away for a bit. it’s been a bit of a mixture like what it says up there.

in brighton to see my daughter for her birthday i got a bit brought up abruptly. it is not very nice to realise that you are a fucking idiot and rather useless. i’ve grown apart from my children and that is a very sad thing. but it all went rather well, considering. i can’t go there without bumping into people that i used to know and this time i bumped into a master boat-builder and also (gulp) someone that i hurt very badly in the past and had done a bad thing to. this was years ago. i wondered if he might want to punch me. but he didn’t and we talked of this and of that and generally made things up.

i said sorry and i meant it.

the children were, and are, wonderful.

i stayed round spag’s house and kipped on his floor. i’ve known him for about fifteen years and we had some catching up to do. life catches some people unawares and leaves them floundering and he’s one of these types. good bloke, salt of the earth, great if you can catch him sober, fucked over by life. he’ll never get back again and that is such a shame.

thursday i felt so ill that i didn’t leave his place. i should really have walked around the town to see what had changed and bump into even more people that i know but i didn’t. i just watched the telly because i haven’t one of my own and it was kind of weird to watch one again after all this time. it’s still crap and i wouldn’t give one house room.

i came back on friday because mallers was coming up for a weekend on the boat and i had to suffer the usual mistreatment at the hands of the rail services. my ticket cost a fortune and there was the usual toilet trouble, the details of which i shall not bore you with.

friday night, on the boat, and mallers, king of all the swedes, turned up and we stayed the night on the pelican wharf moorings. we didn’t arf have some fun. resolved to hit the thames in the morning although my bottle was going and i wasn’t entirely sure…

saturday we went through thames lock with one of the maddest boaters ever who kept his boat on a bit of string and picked slimes off the lock walls and put them in plastic bags. he got me to pick a specimen for him. he wanted to catch the tide so the lock keeper made some calls for him and told him what to do. i wonder where he is now? bloody hook of holland i shouldn’t wonder.

we did the thames ok and i picked up my sister and her two nippers at walton, turned round, went round the island with two junior bun-eating pirates aboard and then back to walton. a successful voyage. then back to catch thames lock before it closed and then on to however far we could get before we lost the light.

omally was getting far too good at boat driving. far too good. ah well.

we did thames lock, town lock, coxes lock, new haw lock, pyrford lock and then we lost the light and moored south of the anchor at pyrford. while we were going along the cut we could smell tantalising smells. it was trouty cooking the dinner. now usually I cook the dinner and steer the boat, i felt that i was going to get made redundant at this rate. omally was doing far too good a job of the boat steering and trouty was doing far too good a job with the dinner.

delish dinner and a game of triv and lot of mucking about later we went to bed far too late and didn’t get up ’til eleven. the plan was to visit newark priory.

oh, at this point i should mention two of the worst boaters that i have ever seen in my life. this was on saturday at coxes lock. they were both pissed or stoned and on a hire boat that they intended to take up the thames. i have never seen a man make such a valliant effort to open a lock gate the wrong way; he pulled and he pulled. what a brilliant pipe-sucking moment for me. that’s when you just stand and look and wish you had a pipe so’s you could go puff puff puff and just watch. i said to him “you have to push it, not pull it” and he said “i just want to go to the pub but he wants to keep going". doesn’t matter, they were bollocksed. thames lock had already shut. i wonder where they are now?

where was i? oh yes. anyway, we went through walsham gates and out through newark lock and moored out on the fields and the king of all the swedes and i went trespassing over to the ruins of newark priory where we took some lovely photos which should shortly appear on a certain gallery near you in a couple of days. i picked some wild flowers, some of which i knew and others we looked up in the flower books. that was good.

some hire-boaters came past. they had cardboard pirate hats on like you get out of a cracker. they saw i was flying the jolly roger and started going “aaaarrrr” and all that. i swiftly whipped out my plastic cutlass and hooky hand and gave them a major “yaaaarrrr” back. the bloke who was steering said “oh, you just had to go one better” and took off his cardboard hat and put on a baseball cap instead.

ha ha ha! out-pirated!

you have to get up very early in the morning to out-pirate the villainous and black-hearted crew of the charlotte rose. never has happened, never will do.

back home we went and scared children along the cut. there were some discussions during the weekend along the usual lines of “you’re not a proper pirate", “oh yes i am and i’ll cut your head off". true delight.

mallers dropped us off (after he had moored the boat disgracefully well, grrrr) and then i got back in to discover that dadblog has either been murdered or stored in liquid nitrogen. this made me wonder what will happen next.

blogging is a funny old thing. you don’t get a round of applause. if you want to write finely crafted stuff you’re better off writing a book and getting some money out of it. but if you are happy to just spew your heart out to people that have nothing better to do than read it and never look back, new horizons, tomorrow is something else et bloody cetera. meh, you know. i love blogging. it sorts my head out.

so, like the title says, GOOD, BAD, HAPPY, SAD and it’s been like that in all ways for me recently. this weekend has been good and happy.

it’s life. it’s the way it goes.

you be careful out there.

love,

h.

the rain woke me up last night.

it beat on the window and the wind poked its fingers round the side of the door.

but this morning it was sunny and i went out for a bit.

this afternoon the sky tore itself in half.

there was such a clap of thunder…

quite a few years ago i was walking home from work in brighton and the rain became outrageous. i was soaked to the skin but i only had a few hundred yards to get home and then

BANG

and the sky tore across and i was filled with fear. the enormous power of the skies and i was out in it. the roar of nature in all its barbarism. i was so scared, the streets were filled with floodwater and the dragon was upon me.

the colossal power of nature was all around me and i was less than nothing.

when i got home i had to take off all my clothes while i stood in the bath because i was so soaking wet…

today there was a thunderclap and the computer went mad for quite a while. there must have been lightning strikes all down the line.

but i love the heavy weather when i’m indoors. best of all i love it if i’m on the boat and listening to it on the steel roof. it’s good inside a car, it’s better still inside a tent, but best of all is being out on the cut and feel the wind thumping and hearing the rain hammering down on the narrowboat when you can just chuck another log on the stove and have some soup. piss-down rain, that’s what i want.

i’d have loved to have been out last night instead of being in a boring flat.

let the rain come down. except that there will be a spate at the weekend now and i shall be filled with fear. but everything will be alright, i’ll be back from brighton and we shall shoot the thames.

unless there’s heavy weather.

see you when they drag me out.

i get the gripes in my stomach sometimes and tomorrow i really HAVE to go back to brighton.

it’s my daughter’s birthday on friday and i have some stuff packed up and ready to take. and i really have to go.

one of the many medical conditions that i have revolves around what i just said. yes, up there. “i really have to go", sometimes.

i’m not talking about nipping behind a tree, i’m talking about if i’m not near a toilet bowl and really quick it could spell disaster. so i will have to take a change of trousers in case it all goes wrong because i will have to spend hours on the trains.

it sounds funny because it IS funny. until it’s you.

irritable bowel syndrome combined with a swig or two too much can wreak havoc. add a pinch or two of fear. the stress (for me) is unimaginable. i would rather not go to brighton but i can’t not go.

i’m terrified of going out of the house. the towpath is ok because there is generally a bit of woodland about and the boat is ok because there is a toilet within a few feet if i must. it’s no wonder that the agoraphobia started and that i hate roads and towns and shops. and tomorrow i have to get to clapham junction with not a toilet in sight and feel all the fear all the way and then oh….. i’m feeling sick at the thought of it.

i’m already wound up. i feel sick and ill but i will do this one thing. i really have to. i can’t do it drunk because that will just make things worse but if i don’t i will feel as if i’m dying. if you drink as much as i do you need to drink just to get by and get through a day by hook or by crook.

of course it would be so much easier to stay at home, near the bog, not go out into the wildlands of townlife. but i really have to do this. i really do because she is my daughter and i am such a rotten father so i must do it even though i am not well.

perhaps i’ll get away with it and have a lovely day. perhaps i won’t. but i’ll do it anyway and there will be some laughs i hope.

laughter is the most important thing in the whole world ever.

but i’m scared. i’m shitting myself in case i shit myself.

ignore me. it’s the fear talking.

g’night.

hey, guess what?

i’ve seen lots of bluebells and that’s really great because i like them.

i also saw the maddest kind of duck ever. it had a blue beak and a funny eye and it was quite little and it was black and white.

oh well, things to do and people to see tomorrow so i had better go to bed.

and don’t worry; apart from my fingers and my toes and the soles of my feet hurting i do not feel at all blue. no, i’m in the pink.

adios.

when the doorbell rang at about 9:30 i was not surprised.

vodka miguel with a bottle of cider in a carrier bag and i was lucky i suppose because it could easily have been a pouched rabbit or two. or some pigeons.

mick wants to start a small business. best i don’t say too much because there are some spiteful people about who might read this but i can say that he wants to be an operative in a countryside type of activity. tomorrow he goes to the C.A.B. to seek advice.

i told him to go to the jobcentre with a business plan and to dress up like a country type so that they don’t get him sent off to an interview to work at car phone twatting warehouse.

he will need some qualifications and some help to go it on his own in a legit way. and i wish him luck. comments gratefully received.

we discussed a way to wind ken up. he has never met vodka mick so i want mick to go down to ken’s boat and do some measuring and write things down on a clipboard. ken phoned me pretending to be from the national trust and i fell for it but i resolved to get him back. and i will.

i really shouldn’t stay up so late again because i have things to do. but, oh, i already have stayed up late again. never mind. i shall go to bed and listen to the radio until
i go t o s l e e e p.

it’s twenty to four in the morning and vodka mick has just left.

he’s a good lad but he has to be up early to go gassing rabbits and mending gates in the very near future. great to see him though; i wondered when he would turn up again.

friendship is such a wonderful thing. all that any of us ever need, really. it isn’t ‘love’, it isn’t duty, it isn’t anything but what it is, just pure and unalloyed friendship. allowances are made without question. just the sight of a friend brings joy to the saddened heart and all the worries and nonsense of the day are put aside as the more important things are discussed.

i’m lucky; i have lots of friends.

but i do wish that vodka mick would come round a bit before ten to eleven.

and now i’m tired,

goodnight.

…is what the psychiatrist did not say when i saw him.

i sat on the chair and answered his questions. this time i think i got the answers right. it’s taken five goes but now it looks as if i will get a referral for admission into detox and rehab. we shall see…

OTHER NEWS

thumb fact: the swelling is somewhat reduced but has taken on a rather ’scrotal’ appearance.

fear fact: i will try to conquer a bit of fear by thinking of the duckling. there is a sailor’s prayer (i’ve probably gone on about this before) that goes something like ‘dear god, please look after me because my boat is very small but the sea is very big indeed’. now the little duckling is just a little ball of fluff. and tasty too. and a few of them get taken by pike but they don’t sit on the bank crying because they are scared, they just jump in and eat some bread and paddle about going “peep, peep, peep".

i think i probably will not get eaten by a pike so that’s a good reason not to worry so much. i resolve to think ‘duckling’ in future.

food fact: i fancy a curry, a really hot one. shame i haven’t got one. a lamb vindaloo with naan bread and tarka dhal and a couple of onion bhajis. except i’d probably only eat about five spoonsful.

kissy kissy, see you later…

today, at the doctor’s, i whined about the lump on my thumb. it was getting to silly size and making my nail go funny. my nice doctor has a similar on one of his fingers. we have compared them but i am the undisputed champ of digit swelling manifestations.

“we have to find out whether this is gout or arthritis” he said and filled out a form. “oh, here comes a blood-test” said i.

then he went away and came back with a big syringe. “are you going to do it now?” i asked. (usually you have to make an appointment for a blood test)

he stuck the thing right in the lump on my thumb. then he stuck it in some more. “look” he said “it’s going right up the tendon”

never mind going up the fucking tendon, i thought it was going to come out of my elbow.

“press hard on it” he said and i did.

it turns out that instead of sucking whatever was living inside the lump out of me he was shoving it back it with a blast of some cortisone stuff. “it’s just mucus, like blood without the red bits in” he announced, gaily, “your body will reabsorb it".

next time i see him i shall do the same on his finger for him.

tomorrow i’m off to see the psychiatrist to see if i can’t get booked into a booze clinic. well, you never know until you try. this will only be the fifth time of asking in a year.

oh, and i have to have yet another blood test. i may not be all that holy but i sure will be holey.

my thumb and my fingers hurt, i get shooting pains all over and when i cooked the dinner i couldn’t face eating it. i haven’t been eating for a while now. when i see the psychiatrist in the morning i shall tell him all about the not eating and the panic attacks and that i have about 250 units of swig in a week.

and then we will see what we will see.

on a lighter note…

i’ve got broadband and it makes this thing go like a racing car. it’s brilliant. it took about 3 hours to install but it seems to be working and lawks does it fly!

so that’s good.

thursday night, crept stealthily aboard the charlotte rose. under cover of darkness no one might have seen that we were there. but as we were going out the next day and depending on which unwritten rule you can’t read, we were within our unwritten rights.

and the next day (friday. do keep up) we set sail for the far north of the cut and to thames lock which is a most mysterious place. well, it is to me, because i had never been through it. thames lock leads to….(drum roll)…. THE THAMES!

we moored facing towards the lock and spent the night there because thames lock is a manned lock and you must not go through it on your own because the lock is locked and you have to wait for a lock-keeper to open up at 9am and start to let you through and also because it is very dangerous.

i felt ill. i felt very ill. i wanted to turn round and go home and lie down. but in the morning i could not turn round. someone had moored a boat at the head of the lock and there was no room to get around. so i decided that as we were there we could go through the lock and then turn round and then come back up and then go home.

that was my plan. just shows how little i know.

when the lock-keeper opened up in the morning we went into the lock with another boat and i didn’t hit anything. the relief lock-keeper turned out to be lex, a man i have known for about at least a decade and some and we had a chat and i asked about the protocol.

the lock gets dropped and you go out into the pound below and moor again and then they have to drop the water again because the water levels in the thames vary so much.

it was too late to turn back; i’d had it.

after they opened the gate on the pound and i had been to the loo and been sick with fear, off we went, like a cork out of a bottle, and i could see the rapids ahead. reading the waves on the water i knew that this was going to mean trouble and my stomach knotted.

when you get out of the bottom end of the navigation you get a delightful treat, a massive weir coming in from the left, and this was combined with a howling wind which blew the boat about a treat. this piece of water was at least the size of the atlantic and so must have been as deep as the atlantic. and my bottle went completely and i had a panic attack.

if you have ever had a panic attack then i am sorry for you because they are not funny. if you have ever had one while trying to take a 20 ton boat over an ocean with waves in it then i empathise. i had a giddy fit.

we made it round the first eyot and then we went back as quick as poss. there could have been sharks or tsunamis or shipwrecks. i was shitting myself. it was the wrong day to have done it and i should have gone with someone else the first time.

thank god trouty was there to calm me but i got in a worse and worse state. seeing as how i can have a panic attack in a supermarket and that i knew i wasn’t well on the day it was a very bad decision to make. but we all mistakes and this time we both lived.

i’m only used to flat water. water with lumps in like that and a howling crosswind were not ideal conditions for my thames debut. i must try to put this fear behind me and do it all again on a day when i’m not ill. and not panic.

we got home safe and saw ken and chris and had a laugh and enjoyed the lovely weather. tomorrow morning i see the doctor and i must mention the fear amongst all the other things. i am ashamed of the panic attack; never used to have them in the golden past.

ah well.

to the hospital which was not a lot of fun.

at the desk which is staffed by hatchet-faced volunteers i asked for directions to the retinal clinic and mentioned that it would be the eye clinic that i was ‘looking’ for.

“oh yes, you have to go down there and take the lift to level 3 and then you will see a sign telling you how to find it".

“but i might not be able to see it”

some tumbleweed blew through and i heard a funeral bell toll.

why people don’t get my jokes i cannot understand. it’s not as if they are convoluted jokes, all they are are the kind of things that i’m sure most people say in their heads but i say them out loud.

the doctor said that my eyes are fine except that i have some diabetic changes to my retinas. how that works out as ‘fine’ i’m not sure but he’s the doctor and not me.

the drops i had put in left me vitually blind. when i went outside to catch the bus i had a snowblind momentand everything went white.

the bus driving bloke was really great. we got dropped off near tesco and then, inside the shop, i told a howling kid in a shop trolley to be quiet. trouty says that his mum gave me a bad look but i can’t see and, plus, i don’t care.

i made a nuisance of myself at the check-out and then we hobbled home. trouty has a gammy leg and i am blind. although i’m blind i do see jokes everywhere.

wherever i may roam i see something about every 30 seconds to laugh about, sometimes in a cruel way and sometimes just funny. you should try living in my head. sometimes it’s a bad place but mostly it is quite a laugh.

laughter is the most important thing in my world. life can be cruel and really unhappy but there are little flashing sparkles of humour going begging in every day.

on my tombstone i want ‘he loved to laugh’ but, as i won’t be there to do it, you will have to.

charlie the hat used to say that he would tread me in and piss on my flowers. it’s a kindly thought. write my chosen epitaph on with a bit of chalk from brighton beach, tread me in and piss on my flowers. remember all the jokes and the laughter and then go down the pub and get drunk.

the joke is that i won’t be paying!

next week i have to see my doctor and then a psychiatrist. medical-land is really fun! except it’s not and sometimes it isn’t that funny at all.

but at the bottom of it all there will be a joke, of that i’m sure.

yours, boatwardly,

h.

the anon trap has worked quite well. the only problem is that no proper idiots have been caught but just childish readers who were trying to make the blog call them a bit of a rude. the original sign-off changification that simon put on was incredibly much ruderer and much funnier but there we go. it had to be toned down a bit i suppose.

changing sign-offs from anons or anonymouseseses is a great idea. the saddoes sit there and pour out their bile (bit like me, i suppose) and then hit enter. great. they come up as commenting by ‘my arse itches because i’ve got worms’ or ‘bang me in the face with a shovel - i might get better looking’ or ‘when i grow up i hope to get a job at mcdonalds cleaning out the bins. or the toilets’.

there is a future in my good idea; as usual i have given it away.

tomorrow i have to go and have my eyes inspected. they will probably scoop them out with a teaspoon.

have a lovely sleep…

h.

i already wrote a blog out but aol crashed it.

anyhoo, thank you for your comments, alan. i would rather that you weren’t so patronising but that is up to you, sweetie, and not me.

time for thanks:

to omally for sending ‘in spite of ourselves’ by john prine and iris deMent. this is a fine song with a classic line in it. i won’t spoil it because i really think you should hear it for yourselves. she goes “he ain’t got laid in a month of sundays, i caught him once and he was….”

can you guess what the end of the line was? i bet you can’t. you have to hear it. you really do.

to simong for putting in the anon buster feature that started off rather rude. as usual like all good ideas it was mine. julianna bust her laughing strings snorting with laughter at the thought. it has now been moderated because alan has decided to be an alan rather than an anon.

tell you what. put an anon comment on my blog and see what happens to it. i kind of preferred the original version but it was very rude and there are children about so perhaps it’s best tamed down a bit.

and, lastly, to alan. thanks for your comments because they are reasoned and caused me to think. i know what you meant about having an incestuous wank-fest blog that was only open to the ‘you have to love me’ squad. i wouldn’t have that for the world.

this blog is made out of third word and eastern european breezeblocks. and can take quite an intellectual kicking.

i look forward to it. so please bring it on and thank you for your time. don’t patronise me but never be scared to have a go.

thanks, alan and simon for the funny techy thing and to mallers for a great choon.

i shall now sit bolt upright, staring into the darkness, trying to go to sleep so i can do the things i have to do tomorrow. and failing on both counts.

g’night.

i had contact lenses in today, for the first time in, ooh, maybe a year.

everything looks funny.

wearing specs you get used to how bent everything goes and when you put the contacts in everything changes because the old noggin can’t cope with the new look. the ground looks like it has had a scoop taken out of it. the computer screen looks concave too.

anyway, where was i?

oh yes, prince buster.

there is no doubt that his jolly tunes are the happiest that i have heard. if you don’t mind blatantly sexist lyrics or some of the most dubious overtones when it comes to this, that and whatever then i’m sure that prince buster is the man for you too.

he asks me if i want to ’ska’.

frankly, yes, i do.

when i hear the brass section kick in and the magical splash cymbal it makes me really happy.

as i continue on my voyage into ska and bluebeat music, prince buster takes me by the hand and off we go…

prince buster is a genius.

come on, anon, pick the sweetcorn out of that. you effing twat.

i must remember to take these contacts out.

have a listen to ‘good vibrations’ or even better ‘god only knows’ off the album ‘pet sounds’ by the beach boys.

there is one thing i sure do know and that is that brian wilson heard a different thing to that which appeared on what is popularly considered to be the best album ever made.

it really is no wonder that he went mad. imagine how it must have felt to have these songs in your head and never to be able to get them down on delicious analogue tape. as mental cripples go i think that brian wilson sitting at a piano in an enormous sand pit and drinking gallons of vodka and dropping acid is pretty cool. imagine having things like that going on in your head, never being able to write them down, never being able to share them with anyone, ever and all the while knowing it would never be done successfully.

trouty has just pointed out something to me that made me feel physically sick. it is in ‘premier edition shopping at home’.

it is ‘new’ and costs just 50 quids!

it has an ‘easy to wash cushion’

you guessed it. it’s a ‘pet stroller’.

it’s a fucking wanky pushchair for shoving your vile and crippled beast about until it’s well past its ‘live by’ date.

“sorry sammy” *loads the side-by-side cogswell and harrison with two cartridges* “but you haven’t been feeling well and the vet’s bills are enormous”

a pet stroller for crappy dogs that shit themshelves is not a good idea, washable cushions or not.

we know someone who has a boat called ’sam stone’. if you listen to the song by john prine you might start to wonder. go on, have a listen to it and tell me what you think.

goodnight.

i got a message today, a message from stu. of stu and sarah fame.

and the message contained a picture, a picture of a house that i have not seen for years. 26 rosemead drive, oadby, leicester. i don’t know what the post code is, i don’t think we had them in the olden days.

for some reason, and i don’t know why, that house means a lot to me. we didn’t live there for more then about 18 months i shouldn’t think. it was the year we won the world cup and my sister was born and my grandpa died. so round about 66 or 67 kind of a time. i remember it snowed and the spiders’ webs on box hedges on the way to school.

we had frog spawn from down at the pond and kept it in a bowl in the back garden and it turned into little black frogs in the end. we had a bendix washing machine and blue vinyl floor tiles and workmen who came round and one of them said to the other “you look pasty". and when he hit the hammer on the chisel my eyes kept blinking shut.

in the olden days you could go and play for ever. we used to go down chicken lane and steal bird eggs or up to the fields where the new houses were. i went walking in the woods there with my dad. and there were sort of gravel pit lakes that you could float rafts in if you were a big boy and saturday morning pictures.

i broke the glass in the back door once. i was waving a bicycle pump about and the handle flew out. we had a chest of drawers with filigree sort of handles and there was my bed that i had chicken pox in and in the other room, at the front of the house, the street light shone in and you could draw on the windows in the frost or mist or whathaveyou and it would project onto the wardrobe doors.
i had a friend called stephen. he lived up by the gravel pits in the new houses. there were piles of builders’ sand all over the place. we wrote down car numbers but he could write quicker than me and in joined-up too. i wrote down my mum’s car number, 837var.

it was a red hillman imp with a cambridge plate.

you can never go back. all you get is disappointed . but i have a strong yearning for mawkish nostalgia. i would like to be back in hemel and sit by the gade and eat mivvis. i’d love to be back in oadby and see all the places that aren’t there any more, i want to be back out on the RN10 in france and hitching and scared that i would never see home again. i’d like to see 61 bismarckstrasse in spandau, berlin once again.

all this before i was 20.

thanks to stu and sarah i had a trip down memory lane. sorry if it was boring for you, but it wasn’t for me.

thanks for the snap. i loved it.

h.

there was a bit of a curfuddle at thirst hall when the phone line went dead as a doornail.

one minute i was in a rubbish chatroom and then it all went wrong. i plugged in the rubbish telephone and got to listen to the sweet sound of silence. normally i like to hear silence but not when i want telephonic things to work.

calm down. calm down.

so i looked up a number in the book and spoke to a man at bt who said that my line would be dead until the 4th of april. there was a problem at the exchange, he said.

i mentioned that as i was calling off my mobile i would be paying about a million pounds and so he called me back. having worked in a call centre for fourteen years i empathised with him. i said i wanted the line to work within one hour because i needed to use my computer to make some deals and that i would lose a lot of money otherwise. this was obviously 100% complete lie. i asked if they could patch me round the exchange so that i could do my wheelings and dealings. this was not possible.

anyway, he was such a nice bloke and it wasn’t his fault so i thought it would be good of me to make his day by being nice. we discussed all the options that i could think of and how they wouldn’t work. then i told him that i really knew that it wasn’t his fault and i didn’t blame him personally and he said that he would make a note of my concerns.

having a note made of my concerns is not usually what i want but there was nothing else that i could do. i would just have to wait. and so i thanked him for his help and wished him a great weekend and said that i hoped he and his family were well.

guess what? gabba gabba hey! because the line is working now. even if it hadn’t been working within the hour i would still have wished him well because it really wasn’t his fault at all. being so nice might have speeded things up but i know that when i worked in a call centre and got a right cunt on the line it would certainly slow things down. never mind 4th of april, more like next april if i was vexed.

anyway. now i have to praise that great broadcaster, mr paul ross, who is going out on LBC 93.7. (more like 97.3) he is really funny and makes me laugh with his quick wit. imagine christmas dinner in the ross household with all the jokes and remarks flying around. for those who do not know, paul ross is the elder brother of jonathan.

he said:” don’t bother getting married, just find a woman you hate and give her your house.”

and that made me laugh.

as regards music i’m listening to jerry lee lewis and john otway and getting into near bliss with joni mitchell singing ‘a case of you’ .

it’s the most beautiful song and when she sings “oh, canada” it knocks me back.

so if there are canadian readers on here then i would like to say that i am SO jealous of you. i want to live in canada. it sounds like the best country in the world.

cheerio.

this is my blog so it’s all about me. yes, me. except it is really about trouty tonight because she has gone ‘twang!’

as a doctor i know all about these things. you see, in your leg, you have what us medical men call a ‘horrible rubbery string’ and in the case of this patient (let’s call her ‘trouty’ for the sake of anonymity) it has gone what us medicos call ‘twang’.

twang is caused by jumping off boats when they are in locks. upon presentation several symptoms may be mentioned; the desire to kick friends right up the arse because of what they wrote in a really good blog but the inability to do so is the chief one. another one is that no matter how much ibuleve the patient eats the pain in the leg does not get better.

as my recent article in the lancet will tell you there is not much of a cure for ‘twang’. the patient must go straight to hospital where, when they stand in their knickers, a group of medical students will laugh. then a medical man like myself, probably with a bow tie on, will tell the patient that they have to lie down for about five years.

then the consultant will ask the patient where the bloody hell they got them crutches from. the patient will reply that they had had them for ages and meant to bring them back, honest.

at this point everyone who is employed by europe’s largest employer, the nhs, will look coldly at the patient.

then the doctor will write out a prescription for ‘one aspirin’.

this is all hypothetical, of course. if your knee string has gone twang then i am very sorry for you. and if you know anybody who has a left leg that has gone all rubbish then send a message of support to:

mynameistroutyandmylegisgoingtogetchoppedoff@putativeamputee.com

goodnight.

it started as a bit of a joke, the rubbish pirates thing.
but with a lot of polishing it might just get to how i want it to be.

it will never be saleable but the stuff that goes on in my head has started to ooze out onto the electronical paper.

childhood revisited.