Walking on the Beaches , Looking at the Faeces.

Yesterday I was on Ryde beach, one of the nicest beaches on the Isle of Wight. Unfortunately, so were a group of 30-odd people walking their dogs. So very soon the idyllic soft golden sand became littered with turds and infested with flies. Not the kind of thing I want to be the crowning glory on top of my sandcastle.

I could bang on about dogpoo containing toxocara eggs (roundworm) and say that someone I knew became infected and lost an eye. I could point out that there are plenty of other places to take your pet for a communal shit, that the tide was out a long way and that there was a vast expanse of mudflats which would have been marginally more preferable for use as a dog toilet.

But all I really need to say is this : It's FUCKING DISGUSTING. It's like rounding up all of your mates and getting them to shit all over a kiddie's playground. It's like playing a game of 'Catch the Crap' in the middle of a crowded cinema. It's like saving up a week's worth of poo in plastic bags and emptying them into the local swimming baths in the middle of the Mothers and Toddlers Group session.

IF YOU CAN'T KEEP YOUR PETS UNDER CONTROL FUCK THE FUCK OUT OF SUCH A PUBLIC PLACE YOU IRRESPONSIBLE BASTARDS, OR I WILL COME ROUND AND TAKE A DUMP IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR LIVING ROOM AND WIPE MY ARSE ON YOUR TEATOWELS.

The Return of the Inlaws.

My inlaws have come to stay. They have been here for an hour and a half . I have ran out of things to say already. They are here for 3 and a half weeks. Tweets will be restricted to narganarganarggh which is the sound of me gnawing my own legs off. One of them has a Hitler moustache from where they have neglected to shave, but I'm not at liberty to point out which one.

My father in law has recently been diagnosed diabetic. And they both seriously need to lose weight. As everything I usually like to eat is either very sugary, salty or fatty I haven't got a clue what to do for the 20-odd evening meals I will have to cook for them . Neither of them has ever been known to make any drinks and I feel like I'm running a fucking cafe.

They don't DO anything. I keep having to check to see if they are still breathing. They are human sloths, they seem content to spend 90% of their time slumped alseep on the sofa. And I can't go anywhere that hasn't got a long succession of conveniently spaced benches as they need to sit down and rest every two minutes. It doesn't help that my Mother In law has become agoraphobic and has to cling onto something /someone everywhere she walks. Walking unaided she becomes a big wobbly scary thing, like a fat Bambi.

****
Well, they came , they sat down on sofas and they went again. They say that they had a good time but I'm not entirely sure how. Maybe one day I will be able to understand and be able to enjoy the experience of sitting on a sofa a couple of hundred miles away from the usual sofa that I sit on.

Hang the DJ

*whrrrr * Alright, who spiked my apple & raspberry j2O?

I am not comfortable in pubs or clubs at the best of times. I think it's because I resent being reminded of the fact that I don't really like alcohol or the effects it can have on me. A bottle of mead at Christmas is normally my entire alcoholic consumption for the entire year (For a while I was known for just drinking blue vodka drinks although I always wished I liked beer so I could feel a bit less freaky). I usually just sit in a corner looking awkward, playing with placemats and trying my best to reply to the odd snatches of conversation that I can actually hear.

So my first night out to a club in a new town was always going to be daunting. Especially as it was to see my eldest daughter (9) take part in the junior category of a Carnival Queen competition.(She is surprisingly pretty in a gothy Wednesday Addams way but can't do the cheesy smile thing you need to do for these things, unfortunately).

But when she went off to be judged, my younger daughter (6) dragged me straight onto the dancefloor and started doing all her funky moves. She has limitless energy when it comes to dancing, the room was packed with young wannabe beauty queens and I was still in my coat as we were too late to grab seats. And I was to be the Big Floor Show Entertainment for the evening. To put it simply, I looked like a total veiny cockshaft. It was more cringy and toecurling than a Jim Davidson Boxed Set.

I am a bloke in my late 30s. When I get on a dancefloor I get an image of Ricky Gervais doing his David Brent dance pops into my head. So all the alarms are going off inside my brain and I can't do anything about it, my daughter is dancing like a demon and the DJ is a big,brainless wobblyarsed zombie.

Take a James Corden, the acceptable face of fat. Then cover him with several thick layers of lard or beef dripping. Work outwards so that his piggy features are lost in the middle of his great lardy face and his eyes resemble cats' arseholes buried in the snow. Then you have something that looks like the DJ we had.

Now don't think that I'm having a go at Fatboy Fat because he was grossly obese. No , the reason I am blogging this is to try and answer one of life's great unexplained questions: Why is always the same shit songs?

For someone to become a DJ, you would assume that they would enjoy music in some way. And there are millions of songs out there. Not all of them are suitable, granted, but a good percentage of them are songs that could be played in a room of mixed age people and get a good cross section of them gyrating.

I reckon these great fat lumbering subhuman bollockbrained DJs hate the rest of the human race so much they become DJs so they can make us all look like twats by dancing to utter pantgravy.

What else would explain the fact that it's ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS Agadoo, the Macarena, Hey Baby, the Cha Cha Slide, Mambo No 5, 5678, the Fuckawful Damian version of the Timewarp, Cotton Eye Joe and Y-M-C-fucking-A? We even had 'I am the Music Man' for fucks sake!! Noone likes these songs! Noone plays them at home! Why then, when we're all gathered together in a big room somewhere are we all meant to arse around going 'A Pizza Hut, A Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and A Pizza Hut'?


I don't get out much. It's probably just as well.

The World has Stopped

No bread. No milk. And worst of all, no hot chocolate. What's the point of being trapped at home, freezing your testicicles off if you can't even have any hot chocolate FFS?
And how can the shops still be getting any newspapers then? Surely in an emergency situation they are only truly useful as arsewiping fodder. The Mail is best for this as it has so much crap in there already, that smearing it with your own buttjunk hardly makes any difference at all.

I can't even get my online shopping delivered. That's not fucking fair - I'm not on a sidestreet, I'm sure there's plenty of grit on the all the roads between the warehouse/store and my flat.

Oi, Tesco! Employ some drivers with proper dangly things swinging about between their legs, not the bunch of wet simpering pussies you currently employ ( This is not a sexist comment BTW - I'm sure there are plenty of brave women drivers you could employ who possess flaps like Cowboy Saloon doors.)

The schools are all closed of course as we all know that children die horribly if exposed to a little bit of snow.... no, wait, that's teachers isn't it?

And the bins haven't been emptied since before Xmas and won't be for at least another week now. There is a huge army assault course wall of black bags (three flats worth of turkey carcasses and unwanted Xmas shit) all rotting outside next to my kitchen-cum-fridge. (When I say kitchen-cum-fridge I of course mean that it is freezing in there, not that I'm storing up all my wankjuice).

ARRRGHHH! I really hate Jan & Feb. Wish we could ditch them altogether and just go straight into Spring when things can actually start happening again...

Happy Fucking New Year !

Heading South for Winter

I had a really blocked nose this week .

I tried inhaling menthol crystals over a bowl. - but I put in far too many. They didn't succeed in unclogging my nose but my eyes were STREAMING. I went to wipe my eyes and I must've had some menthol-water on my fingers... I couldn't bear to open my eyes, the pain was unbearable.

At the same time my wife sliced her finger, big time, in the kitchen. I was bumbling around blind going 'are you OK, honey?'. It only needed the kids to have fallen down the stairs at this point and the Golden Comedy Moment would've been complete.

This was also the day that I was let down by our lorry driver for our imminent Isle of Wight move ('Uh, I didn't realise that having a camera put in your knee was a big operation...') and by our guarantor for the flat ('If the shop burns down we'll liable for EVERYTHING!') and we really really didn't think it was going to happen after all, that we were going to end up homeless and jobless and stuck in the Midlands forever.

But *touch wood* it is currently looking like the Big Move is Actually Going Ahead , despite everything, and my major concern at the moment is getting rid of lots of furniture.

We have advertised several items in the local paper and today I had a posh-sounding lady ring up about a cabinet. This cabinet was trapped in an end corner of the middle room. I had to squeeze and clamber and leap like a spawning salmon up a waterfall to get to it whilst the lady fired me all sorts of Cabinet-related questions. Then she asked me about the dimensions of the cabinet and I hadn't measured it. So I climbed out to get a tape measure and crawled through back again, all the time sounding like a complete out-of-breath idiot on the phone. Then I pulled down the tape measure to see how high the cabinet was and the sharp metal edge of the tape measure sliced deep into my thumb. So I had to continue trying to sell the item to the lady, all the time spraying blood all over it.

She agreed to come and look at it- or more likely it was out of curiosity to see what this bizarre Panting Idiot-man actually looked like. Anyway, this means I had to quickly wipe the blood off both me and the cabinet, singlehandedly move lots of wardrobes and other heavy items of furniture as well as dozens of boxes of books and stuff before I was able to drag it to the front door, just as the lady arrived. I sold it for £10 but I don't believe she fully appreciated the effort I had gone to.

Tomorrow, somebody's coming to collect a sofa...

*******

Monday 23rd Nov

With the sofa now gone, House Jenga is now a little easier. Some blokes from Sense came round and just took our coffee table and computer desk, turning their noses up at everything else. Charity shop doesn't want my stuff? Well, that's a surefire confidence booster! Huh, since when did they start getting all picky? Hmm... so we STILL had a houseful of furniture. Second Chance couldn't help us but they gave me a number for House Clearance. But that way would cost a fortune we didn't have so we had to resort to Plan H: Smash the lot up with a big hammer.

Lots of sheving and chests of drawers were broken up into teeny tiny pieces and taken to the tip. Not the way I wanted to do things.

But if you throw an old wardrobe down the stairs it will explode most impressively.

Tuesday 24th Nov

Half our stuff now in splinters, miraculously, everything we wanted to take with us fitted into the removal van. Our problem now was making sure we had a guarantor sign the form - we could still get down there and find that we are unable to move in! Not till next morning do we discover that it had already been signed and nobody from the estate agents had told us!

Wednesday 25th Nov

We did it! We moved into a flat above one of the many expensive sailing wear shops in Cowes Town Centre. This is the start of a whole new life for us and hopefully this next year will be be a little kinder and gentler to us all than the last.

I'm Dreaming of a Wight Christmas... x

How I Got Into This Mess

2009 has been a crazy bastard of a year and I think I need to do a brief recap of it about now in order to explain why my wife and kids and I are currently living with my inlaws ( or Compo and Norah as they don't know that I like to call them) and to tell you about my Costliest Joke.

After Jude died in January we came back from Birmingham to Nuneaton and had to deal with all the usual crap from Tax credit and all the usual idiots who send you made up bills with random figures on them (Thanks guys, much appreciated ).Then I returned to work and found that everything had changed...

I had worked since November 2003 as a bookseller in Coventry. I ran the Children's Book section and I had found Ottakar's a lovely company to work for, one that cared about it's staff and customers and of course, books. I worked damn hard, wrote many reviews, was a key player in judging the Children's Book Prize and I was held in highly regard by Head Office. It wasn't to last however.
W*t*rst*n*s, a company who don't give a flying fuck for any of it's staff, customers or books, just the Pursuit of Making as Much Money as They Can, bought out Ottakar's and in just over a year managed to squeeze all the life out of the company, stamping on it like a Grim Reaper in Giant Hobnailed Boots. There were a third of the staff that used to work there and the job was constantly being updated to be made much more complicated and stressful. When I returned, everyone's jobs were unstable as devastating changes to the contract were being put into place, the final nails in the coffin for many a longstanding bookseller.
As a few managers themselves testified to The Bookseller magazine, they were being told to 'Get Rid of Staff- By Whatever Means Necessary'. As someone who was unafraid to speak out against the cliqueness, bad decisions and general double-standards within the store I was prime target.

I often doodle on newspapers or add funny comments and this became very popular with other members of staff. When a colleague brought in a copy of the Daily Mirror and left it on the staff room table I couldn't resist. The picture on the front was of Barack Obama meeting the Queen and Prince Philip, the latter looking decidedly uncomfortable. I thought it was hilarious so I drew a speech bubble coming from Prince Philip's mouth and wrote the words 'Hands off Darkie, She's Mine!' in it. I thought it would have been obvious to anyone with half a brain that I was satirising the Duke's well-known xenophobic attitude.

The following Monday (the day when the rules were changed to make it easier to sack people in these matters!) I got hauled into the Manager's Office and I was treated like a sack of shit. I was told I was suspended for Gross Misconduct, that they could sack me. That I was a Racist. I told them that was absurd. That I hated racism with a passion, that the joke was anti-racist, that I lived in the middle of a large Asian Community and got on very well with everybody, that my best friend (who I'd known for 28 years) was Moslem, that if they wanted me to explain to the anonymous person who took offence then I would do gladly, and that this was an unnecessarily underhand way to deal with the situation. I pointed out the irony and hypocrisy of someone getting offended by a word who worked in a bookshop, who was surrounded by millions of 'bad' words , hundreds of shocking pictures or potentially offensive opinions. That it was utterly mad that a word should be deemed so offensive that ANY usage of it whatsoever was wrong.

I was told no, we don't care. It's Racist, that's that. I was told I couldn't talk to anybody about it, couldnt go on Facebook, couldnt have any contact with other members of staff, that I couldn't even go to a birthday party ffs! (all complete lies). I was then escorted out of the building - after I'd ask to leave and they wouldn't let me!

I spent the next few weeks seething, not sleeping and making a huge file full of reasons why their accusation was complete and utter bullshit - examples of Racist jokes/drawings by other staff members, Duke of Edinburgh quotes, similar gags from HIGNFY, what my friend Mohammed thought of it, other people's views on the D word and its use in literature etc -
But at the hearing in Birmingham they didn't want to know about any of it. My thoughts were irrelevant. The person conducting the hearing - close friend of both the manager and the person I believe made the complaint - was acting as Judge, Jury and executioner.

I scraped a final warning. You could tell he was annoyed that he couldn't get enough of a confession out of me to sack me outright. I could go back to work - but then How the Fuck can you possibly go back to work after that? Your manager wants you out, another staff member wants you out - and they can make your life a living hell and if you put a word out of line they can sack you. Everyone else had been interviewed for their jobs. I had to have an interview even though I was selecting Redundancy - even though I would've lost half the points by being on a Gross Misconduct charge. ( They still made me sweat it out wondering if I still had a job though, Fuckers)

Luckily I only had to go back to work for 3 days before I had an operation on my foot (to remove ganglions) By the time I was recovered I no longer had a job and I was finally free of the Evil Empire. The two other original Ottakars staff at the store left at the same time.

Two good things happened next - I discovered the therapeutic properties of Twitter (where there were lots of lovely people and I could make all the jokes I wanted) and we took a much-needed family holiday to the Isle of Wight (my wife's favourite place and the kids have fallen in love with it too).

When we returned, we had an Electric inspection . The house had faulty wiring, water pouring into the hallway, dripping bitumen under the stairs, there were lead pipes, cracks along the bath, electric circuits that were 30 years out of date... It wasn't safe. The landlord had took the majority of the winter getting the lounge gas fire fixed. We had to move out fast. A friend had a property she was willing to let and we moved... but we didn't. We had too much stuff! It would've been impossible for us to fit in - (Plus it is pretty disgusting and there always a fresh dog poo outside the gate ) so we left our belongings in the friend's house and decamped to my in-laws. Which brings us just about up to date.

Except to say: we're off again! My wife has got a job in Southampton and we're moving into a flat above a shop in Cowes in two weeks time (without seeing it! ) It is furnished so we have to downsize and dejunk furniture pretty rapidly . The next few weeks are going to be Hell on Earth but after that... I think that life is heading us all in the right direction.

If Jude hadn't have died, or if I hadn't lost my job, we'd never have done it. We'd have always thought 'Oh, that'd be nice' but never actually done anything about it. And we'd have been caught up in a loop and life would have gone on the same for years, day-in. day-out. But now, with nothing to lose, nothing to leave behind we have been cornered into making some big life-altering decisions. Hopefully, it'll turn out to be a good fresh start for the family.

Auntie May

My mother in law's sister, known to everyone as 'Auntie May' comes round on Tuesday afternoons and stays for hours and hours and hours. This is both a joy and a pleasure - for all lovers of mindnumbingly bumachingly tedious conversation, that is. It is hours of 'yeah, yeah' 'hmm, hmm' and 'that's it ain't it?'. There is endless non-debate about the manners of the youth of today and how terrible things are now and also constant surprise and wonder at the weather's ability to change from rainy to non-rainy and back again.

This weeks highlights were "That new store has just opened and so and so bought a packet of Whitworth's stuffing Mix for 17p" and "There's a really nice front door down the street. A brown one"

I have been entombed in the house with my Living Dead In laws for too long now. Even the bleeping , whistling electronic-sounding feedback from my (tone deaf) M.I.L. 's hearing aid, which makes her sound like R2D2 with a flannel has just about stopped being funny. I need to escape.

Which is why when my wife had a job interview yesterday on the Isle of Wight we were all very excited indeed. This was it! This was our big chance! This was all we'd dreamed of for so long! Escape from the Zombie Hotel and moving miles away from miles and miles away for a fresh start for all the family. It was a blinding interview and it got down to the last two candidates and it would've been just perfect and.. and... and... she didn't get it. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.

Oh well, I Wonder what Auntie May will talk about next week?