"Two nil up, you f***ed it up"

Now I've slipped out of my two week coma, normal service will resume in these parts. Thank you for all of the flowers, grapes, celebrity magazines, and chocolate encrusted furniture you sent to me. Chance would be a fine thing.

Over the weekend I ventured south, in a southwardly direction, to the south of England, whereupon I stumbled across my beloved football team taking part in the inaugural fixture of the new Premier Leage season at newly-promoted Reading. A banana-skin match if ever there was one. This was probably the worst possible day of the season to face a newly-promoted side away from home. Inevitably the whole club - players, chairman, fans, kitman, groundsman, concourse chewing-gum removal officer, I could go on... (no? OK) - will be totally fired up for occasions like this. Boro faced a tough test.

A rubbish mobile phone photo of the Madejski Stadium


As it turned out, it was a walk in the park for Boro as we breezed into a 2-0 lead in the first twenty minutes. Fine, quick-tempo, composed possession football. We were oozing with confidence and always looking dangerous. But what followed was a tragedy, a collapse of elephantine proportions. We welcomed the kind of comeback usually reserved for ourselves in the latter stages of last year's UEFA Cup. If Boro were pigeons then Reading were cats. We just flew up, out of the way of conflict, as if in a town centre pedestrian zone, narrowly avoiding the faces of people going about their everyday business. Legs turned to jelly, heads were lost, Boro shirts began to mince about all over the place, each collapsing in turn and at the most inopportune moments to gift Reading victory. 3-2 down, nowhere to go. But we carve out an equaliser, get in, 3-3! But blimey, crikey and damnation, it's been wrongly disallowed. Defeated, we slope away. To make matters worse, we're still in Berkshire. What the hell do you do in Berkshire?

To think I missed all this football malarkey. The false hopes, the shattered aspirations - to think I craved them all summer. Next it's Chelsea at the Riverside. We'll beat them you know.

Is this the greatest invention since The Wheel?

Possibly not. But it's certainly the best since people reinvented unsliced loaves, or first developed those contraptions you use to make melon balls.

A whopping 49cm of sheer plastic, it was introduced to the family home by my mother following a purchase for the princely sum of 79p from the local miscellaneous tat establishment, Boyes. Truly a purchase to alter the way we live our lives, the very tissue of our existence. Fly-swatting will never be the same again. Gone are the days of frustration of prancing about any given room with a rolled-up copy of the local evening paper, frantically slapping it towards flies who are always too quick, and may require at least seven murder attempts before witnessing their joyous elimination.

They've been particularly prevalent over the last few weeks with this nasty, oppressive heat wave we've been having. But since the glorious contraption pictured above entered my life, I've never needed a second swing. Every fly goes down with the first swat. The adrenalin rushes, my testosterone levels explode in a shower of machismo. When armed with this instrument I truly am the Daddy - do not cross me.

P.S. It also has many other uses, including the use of the white mesh-like structure for sieving flour while baking a lovely cake. If you have any other suggestions for the use of the fly-swatter, please do add a comment and I'll test it out.

PVC and the Political Process

I see Tony Blair has been talking this week about political ‘cross dressing’. Party policy is no longer defined by the traditional left vs right divide, he says, and modern politics will instead be characterised by rampant cross-dressing between parties. I suppose if anyone’s going to know about this, it’s Blair.

It might have been Kinnock who kick-started the ‘modernisation’ of the Labour party by building a PVC conservatory on party HQ in the early 1990s, but it’s Blair who’s been inviting all and sundry around for his wild, debauched PVC fashion nights since 1997. He’s been handpicking powerful media types and potential party donors with the sole intention of getting them round to the party offices for regular saucy knees-ups in the hope of securing their support for his regime. This conjures allsorts of entirely unpleasant images of John Prescott standing agog in the corner of the room sipping voluptuously from a goblet of Pimms, and dressed in a figure-hugging black PVC corset complete with snug (Yorkshire-Rose-emblazoned) thong and fishnet stockings. All while Alistair Campbell presumably works the room in a white PVC nurse outfit with lace-up side skirt, headpiece and stethoscope. I think I need to lie down.

But no, the point here is that if parties keep going on like this, reinventing themselves in a clamour for the middle-ground when they’re in opposition, it all makes politics very difficult to engage with for the urchin in the street. As the major parties try to distance themselves from long-held standpoints on major issues, nobody will know where Labour or the Tories stand on anything. But of course that's the intention. The political establishment wants to reduce the democratic process to a battle of personality, this is nothing new... and the main reason is in order to divert attention from where they stand on issues, because really the major parties are standing in exactly the same place.

David Cameron, tomorrow.


Of course, it’s probably all irrelevant in the long-run anyway because it’s well known that parties have never really won elections, they just lose them. So the Opposition simply needs to wait for whoever’s in government at any given time to create sufficient education/healthcare chaos (in our relative, first world sense) so as to be forced out amid a wave of ‘change’. The parties can just keep on cross-dressing, holding up various outfits against each others bodies and complimenting each other with remarks like “ooh that really suits you” and “yes, that black plastic sheen really is your colour.” The political process will just chug on regardless, without anyone really needing to do or say anything.

My prediction here is that the general electorate will eventually become so bored with cross-dressing and hollow political showmanship to the point where they find themselves boiling with rage, boycotting and overthrowing the established democratic process, and then replacing it with a form of collectivist anarchism – as advocated by everyone’s favourite bearded Russian revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin.

Yes! This will be Blair’s legacy... the abolition of the state and private ownership of the means of production. I bet the tranny bastard never saw that coming. Mwahaha.