Bloody Maidstone

The bloody shops are full of bling,
While bloody hoodies do their thing
Outside bloody Burger King,
In bloody Maidstone.

Bloody rain, no bloody sun,
Bloody crowds no bloody fun,
I wish I had a bloody gun,
In bloody Maidstone.

Traffic’s seized up, can’t turn right,
One way system’s bloody shite,
Parking’s just a bloody fright,
In bloody Maidstone.

Bloody mall is full of druggies,
Teenage girls with bloody buggies
Pushing kids in stolen huggies,
In bloody Maidstone.

Bloody schoolkids by the doorfull,
Their bloody manners bloody awful.
It makes you wonder why they’re lawful,
In bloody Maidstone.

Don’t even go there bloody nights;
It’s full of chavs as high as kites,
Staining walls and starting fights,
In bloody Maidstone.

Its celebrities are ‘B’ list benders;
Except for ‘Barry’ from East Enders
And Mckenzie Crook, they’re all horrendous,
In bloody Maidstone.

So what’s the county’s fairest city?
Is it Maidstone? Is it titty!
Only the irony is witty,
In bloody Maidstone.

BT

(With acknowledgements to Capt. Hamish Blair for ‘Bloody Orkney’ and John Cooper Clarke for ‘Chickentown’)

Twitter

I'm just trying you out to see what everyone's talking about.

Sorry. I was playing with Twitter, and it asked me what I was doing.

Ooo. I've got a tweet.

Brothertobias@ nudrig2 No, I'm not famous. Although I like to think I have a modest following in the world of scripophily.

Brothertobias@ nudrig2 Not at all. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Another tweet. That's two tweets already.

Brothertobias@heavenlytwinny Thank you. It's early days. What about you?

Brothertobias@heavenlytwinny I do find the 140 word limit a constraint when trying to address issues of any complexity, especially when there is a moral or ethical dimen

Bugger

Brothertobias@heavenlytwinny dimension

Brothertobias@wedekindboy Isn't 0825 an odd time to be eating pesto?

Brothertobias@heavenlytwinny Ahaha :)

Brothertobias@wedekindboy Ah. Guadalajara. I understand. Wasn't thinking. No, I don't think I'm that Brother Tobias; I never taught at a mission school.

Brothertobias@wedekindboy No, really. I've never even been to Mexico.

Brothertobias@wedekindboy Well quite. That must have been very painful, and you have every right.

I have to go now.

_______________________________________


I dunno. I guess it's like marmite. It has a strange fascination. Yes, I visited Stephen Fry's tweets, of course I did. And thence to Sandi Toksvig's sister's. It was a learning experience (I didn't know Sandi Toksvig had a sister). And snooped in on some familiar bloggers, whose one-sided chatter was witty and entertaining, like listening to shiny people at the next table, wishing they were your friends.

But it's a bit like Blogger with just the comments and no blogs. I don't want to start collecting celeb responses like tiny trophies. And just tweeting and being tweeted would become a full time occupation. It's as if networking has become the end, not a means.

I admire anyone who can blog and twitter. So many balls to keep up. Some of my favourite bloggers have taken to Twitter. You know who you are. But I hope we who are left sedately in the blogosphere don't lose you altogether.

Select Committee Calls for Ban

An influential Parliamentary Committee has called for introduction of a minimum price for books and other literary products. Citing research that showed that the real price of literature has fallen dramatically in the last 30 years, the Home Affairs Select Committee wants to ban special promotions and prohibit supermarkets and other outlets from selling books at a loss to attract customers. Chairman Keith Vase said that popular titles were 69% more affordable now than they had been in 1980. "Police are spending too much time dealing with reading-fuelled social unrest, and the easy availability of reading material is contributing to the problem. More working time is lost through reading than through accidents in the bath, and there is increasing evidence of older people stocking up and reading at home, often solitarily. They may be unaware of the dangers of excessive reading, which can damage eyesight and contribute to obesity and heart disease. We are asking for a ban.

"We are particularly concerned at products intended to entice younger people to read. Brands such as Harry Potter may seem innocuous, but they can quickly become habit-forming. Studies suggest that early reading increases the risk of developing a lifelong reading habit."

Besides seeking to legislate against the sale of cut-price literature, the committee wants to revoke the licences of some outlets currently authorised to sell reading matter; introduce prominent health warnings drawing attention to the physical and mental health consequences of reading; and outlaw reading in public places. When it was suggested to Mr Vaj that some people enjoyed reading and that moves to restrict it might be unpopular, he replied, "Happy readers lead to unhappy communities. The Government needs to act decisively in the public interest."

[For any non-UK readers, a Select Committee has today called for restrictions on the sale of alcohol]

Simon Cowell and Pot Noodles

Like any apprentice old git, BT regularly sounds off about use and abuse of language. I know language evolves and all that guff but I think, like the pool of human knowledge in a post-apocalyptic society, the vocabulary of individuals may be shrinking.

There are lots of reasons why it might; narrowing educational syllabi, syllabuses or syllabus; fewer people reading; TV; pot noodles; Simon Cowell; text-spell; rap; or the inability to walk through a shopping mall without a mobile in one hand and a bottle of branded water in the other. I wonder if this first generation of bloggers may turn out to be a golden one, blogging Blogging's swan song.

I know few things are more irritating and arrogant than whingeing about people's use of english. Just because I prefer ruh-search to reeee-search, forr'ed to four-head, doesn't mean I'm right (although; There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her four-head. And when she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was whore-head).

But I can't help minding. It's my beautiful language too, and they're using it like an ashtray.

Anyway, this piece of BT doggerel is for riders who are not readers. I'm sure they'll thank me for it:

How to Tell a Ménage from a Manège

In the days of the Raj
Gents knew a ménage
Was the way the French spoke
Of a bird and a bloke.

In that fastidious age
They knew a manège
As a general rule
Meant a riding school.

So a 'ménage a trois'
Was three people cuddling
Not three schooling rings
(It's all a bit muddling)

The problem, of course is
We'll be inviting troubles
If we keep schooling horses
On French married couples.

Personalised Number Plates: How to be a Wazzer on the Cheap

I've never understood why people are prepared to pay shed loads of money for personalised number plates - most of which stretch credibility trying to make intelligible words out of a motley mixture of numbers and letters. They might just as well wear a bumper sticker reading 'I'm a Tosser'.

You know the sort of thing; ' D4N13L' for 'Daniel,' etc. Or the initials and low numbers ego trip, like 'AM 913'. Which just means that 910 people with the initials AM have got more prestigious ones than the man in front. (The other two are owned by someone's ex wife who won custody of the Porsche, and a Cornish broc grower in St Buryan named Janner Spargo, who's beggared if he's going to sell the AM 2 reg from his old Massey Fergusson to some emmet from across the Tamar who doesn't belong go messing about with other people's numbers in the first place; "By gar, mazed thickerd! Wozee goyn dowidden, boy?")

Now I've just had a brainwave. Instead of spending £20,000 on a registration number with your initials on, change your name by Deed Poll to suit your existing registration number. You can do that for just £7.99.

From next week Brother Tobias will be changing his name to Urquhart Vaughan Longbottom. How cool will I be! You may call me Urq for short. Ansom, me luvver.

Of course there is the slight downside that if stopped by the Police, I will not only be unable to recall my registration number, but also my name.

Bombay Duck - Big Rant

Invader Stu's stranger's impression of Brussels (here) made me wonder what was peculiar about Britain, and what made expatriate bloggers seem somehow less critical of their places of residence than UK bloggers are of theirs. And I realised that what is most peculiar about Britain is that we are all pissed off, almost all the time, about just about everything.

We are pissed off with the government, and we are pissed off with the opposition. We are pissed off with fighting other people's wars for brownie points from Bush, who also pisses us off. We are pissed off with our jobs. We are pissed off with the weather. We are pissed off with the education system, the examination system and most of the products of these. We are pissed off with the NHS; council tax; the BBC; reality TV; Simon Cowell; traffic; telephone masts; development; the cost of the Olympics; the police; depletion of fish stocks; the TV licence; refuse collections; foot and mouth; bird flu; blue tongue; chavs; dog poo; Celebrity Strictly Come Dancing X Factor Idol Academy; all television programmes involving house purchase, house decoration, antiques, cooking and child-rearing in any combination; boy bands; Simon Cowell; Ann Widdecombe; the nanny state; lying politicians; the flimsiness of bin bags; the postal service; mobiles on trains; mobiles in shops; foreigners with loud voices; baby buggies; hoodies; gangsta rap; the way Blair walks; anyone who says 'It's time to move on'; EC regulations banning Bombay duck; EC regulations full stop; all government ministers; George Galloway; Tony Banks; fly tipping; gum on pavements; in-car-deodorants; the ending of analogue TV; auditory bird scarers; 'Baby on Board' signs and each other.

We are one pissed-off nation. It's no wonder we have a reputation for whingeing. (Although if the Aussies were over here, I bet they'd be whingeing fit to bust before you could say 'toss us a tinny'). I think this overcrowded, overworked, underpaid country could be edging towards some kind of unstable, critical mass of pissed-offedness. And I don't think the government's obsession with taxing and banning our consoling vices in order to encourage us to live longer so that we have to work longer to pay for living longer and getting even more pissed off is going to help exactly.

We really need to rethink the aspirations by which we measure human progress and elect governments. A philosophy of perpetual economic growth isn't making us happier, and it isn't making this crowded island a better place to live. Who needs 150 inch, flat screen, 4x4, tumble drying iPhones anyway? We should start passionately protecting and enhancing our quality of our life instead, like our quality of life depended on it.

Wow. I feel better for that. Happy Christmas!

Yo! Sushi, or A Glam Night Out at Bluewater

Imagine being given a menu with 130 or so dishes, most of which look like at least 20 of the others. Then have someone put the dishes in pastel-shaded hamster exercise balls and have them hurtle past you on a miniature airport carousel. Sit several feet away from the carousel, with a couple of people between you and it, and then say, 'Grab me a pink one with two small pellets of cold rice wrapped in a sort of blackish leaf with a prawn on top, would you, when one goes by?'

While you are waiting, help yourself to water from the tap in the middle of the table (£1 for as much as you can drink), exclaiming merrily when the drips from the tap pass through the hole in the table onto your feet and into your shopping.

At intervals invite the smiling staff to refill your bowl of miso soup (£1.75 for as much as you can drink), and marvel at their dexterity as they stack the bowls, refill them, then redistribute them back in a different order. Wonder as you sip from someone else's bowl whether they have washed their hands since handling the bowls of the table next door, and whether the complexion problem of the gentleman in the Burberry baseball cap is communicable.

After your empty hamster balls have been counted and you have entered your card details at the check-out, chuckle as you discover that instead of entering your pin number, you have keyed in a tip of £98.95.

Buy Kentucky Fried Chicken on the way out.

Oh! Who can ever be tired of Bath?

Just as there are doggy people and cat people, so there are bath people and shower people. I am a doggy and bath person (although I wouldn't want that quoted out of context).

A bath is one of life's greatest pleasures, both simple and sybaritic. Baths can be a deep heat treatment, soothing stress and aching muscles (who hasn't fallen asleep in a bath? Fall asleep in a shower and you'll end up in a tangled heap on the floor, probably in a croustade of broken glass). Add scented unguents or healing balms, and a bath is a marinade (you can't marinate in a shower, anymore than you can flavour food under a tap).

Above all, you can read in a bath. In fact, there is no better place to read, as long as you don't fall asleep. It's so important to me that I've fitted my bath with a reading light. I defy you to read in a shower without having someone stand outside, holding the book to the glass and turning the pages for you. You can't eat cake in a shower either, and it quite ruins champagne.

I can't seem to get on with showers anyway. Quite apart from all that jolly communal showering at school and in sports venues (maybe I'm weird, but my instinct when in male company is not, 'Let's get naked and wash our genitals together'). Nowadays my experience of showers tends to be in hotels. The cubicles are invariably too small, so that it's impossible to bend down to pick up the soap or wash your feet without cracking your head on the ceramic-tiled wall. There is either nowhere to put the soap, so one is forced to balance it on the lip of the shower stall (when by sod's law it invariably falls outwards), or there is a soap rack parsimoniously fashioned out of three strands of chromed wire, through which you post the soap straight to the shower tray (which has a partially blocked drain and has filled up with water to ankle depth).

And how are you supposed to wash your feet in a shower? Aside from the no-room-to-bend-over issue, balancing naked on one leg on a wet, slimy plastic tray, surrounded by sheet glass, is a recipe for disaster, and I think ROSPA should investigate. Not to mention the wisdom of sharing a waterfall with a 30 amp electric water heater. I asked a keen shower person about the foot washing problem the other day, genuinely interested in discovering what I was doing wrong. He replied that you don't have to actually wash your feet, as just standing around in the water did that for you. I've been next to people like that on buses.

Then there is the whole temperature control thing. Standing around with one arm stretched out through a jet of alternately ice-cold, then blisteringly hot water, adjusting temperature and flow variables until the temperature settles down. Then, when you're in there, someone in room 311 flushes a lavatory and the water suddenly becomes incandescent/freezing, and by the time your body has discerned which you have 60% burns. In my brother-in-law's house they have to put up a sign on the kitchen sink when someone is having a shower, so no one turns a tap on.

And don't come that one about showers using less water. Using my well-honed book-lover's technique of getting in when the bath is virtually empty, then dribbling hot in at just the right rate to keep a constant temperature, I can make a few gallons last a blissful hour. I've known showers that blasted out a gallon every 30 seconds, and people who spend ten minutes or more in them.

There are moves afoot to phase out baths, allegedly in the interests of the environment, but really to save space. Art will be the first casualty; think of the bath's iconic rôle in the history of painting, from Degas and Ingres to Fernando Botero. Literature too. Dylan Thomas wrote, 'Poetry is not the most important thing in life...I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets'. Or Tennyson; 'It is the height of luxury to sit in a hot bath and read about little birds' ('Little birds?' What was that about?).

Nobody's ever named a town after a shower, either.

Big Guns, Little Richards

The story this week about the duck that survived being shot and kept for two days in a fridge reminded me of Percy. Our late neighbour was an elderly widower who had no remaining family. He lived for his garden and the wildlife that frequented it, including a pheasant which became so domesticated that it would come into his kitchen and feed from his hand. When the guns were out, Percy simply lay low in the garden. As a result, he survived long past his expected life span - much to the frustration of the local gamekeeper.

When our neighbour died, we had little choice but to go on feeding Percy, who was by now too old to fend for himself. Until one day a convoy of four-by-fours formed a great horseshoe round the garden. Out of them clambered a lot of short, round men in shiny green gum boots and state-of-the-art mail-order country wear, all zippers and leather patches and unnecessary pockets. The sort of men who are taller on a bar stool than off it. Who have labradors named 'Bramble', and guns whose size is in inverse proportion to their...well, you get the idea. For the next few minutes all hell broke loose, as dogs crashed about in the neighbouring shaw, beaters whistled, shotguns banged, pellets rained down on the roof, and our own dog had a nervous breakdown under the sofa. Then the little fat men waddled the two or three feet back to their Range Rovers and drove away.

Of course that was the last we saw of Percy, although it was a consolation that he would have been completely inedible. I wonder sometimes about this noisy sport, which seems a tad lacking in the elements of courage and endurance that most decent sports possess. Although, satisfyingly, two local shooters were injured recently whilst 'lamping', when the truck they were sitting in set off too quickly, and they fell off the back.