Things that make you go hmm…

The evil looks the female news reader was giving her male co-presenter as he read the news that women get paid 17% less for doing the same job.

Great Idiots of History

People always going on about the magnificent whats-his-face who did this or the wonderful so and so who made that.

But I think it is about time the great idiots of history are celebrated. Those stupid fools whose unthinking mistakes have changed the world for ever:

1. The idiot record company executive who turned down the Beatles when they turned up at his office. The Beatles were clearly talented right from the start but this fool didn’t think so and showed them the door. However if the fuckwit hadn’t made this stupid mistake they wouldn’t have met Brian Epstein who taught them to write fantastic songs and the 60s pop music scene would have been slightly different.

2. Christopher Columbus – what an idiot. Contrary to popular belief European academics knew that the world was round and exactly how big it was - the Chinese had told them. But Christopher was thick and thought the world was 15,000 or so miles smaller than it is. What the fuckwit was proposing was clearly impossible and that was why no one was prepared to give the crazy idiot any money. Queen Isabella, who clearly had more money than sense, only gave him some to shut him up. As is the way with many fools lady luck helped him out and put a whole new continent where the idiot thought Asia was. How jammy is that? If it wasn’t for this fuckwit someone else would have found the Americas and history would be slightly different.

3. The stupid storm trooper in Star Wars who didn’t fire on the escape pod containing C3PO and R2D2 at the beginning of the film. If the idiot had done the story wouldn’t have unfolded and the Star Wars would have been a very short and confusing film. Lucas wouldn’t be so rich and 6 film loads of special effects would have never been made.

4. Can’t think of any more because I am a stupid idiot.

And number one: The worst job in my entire life is… Sales Rep: Teddy Bear Trading Co. Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

When I heard the Pleasure Beach was hiring I was over it like a rash. Blackpool Pleasure Beach was the biggest free entry amusement park in Europe it had just opened the highest roller coaster in the world. It was filled with filthy slappers out for a good time. As an employee you got free tickets to dish out as you pleased and easy access to female purveyors of the moistular arts.

After the induction where they explained the legal definition of why we shouldn’t sell drugs to punters whilst in uniform, why we really shouldn’t operate the rides whilst on them and that we shouldn’t call them punters at all but “guests” we were allocated our roles.

“The big dipper, the big dipper.” I prayed.

But I didn’t get the big dipper.

I got a shop.

It was called “The Teddy Bear Trading Co.”

It was in the arse end of the park that no one ever went to.

Ever.

It was a 4 by 4 metre room filled wall to wall with stuffed toys. Bears and deers and steers, gorillas, pandas, rabbits and hares. Ten thousand blinkless beady eyes staring, baring onto my being.

No one came in.

Ever.

Outside I could just, over the dunes, see the sea rolling in and out dragged by the moon.

In the corner a 6 foot fake tree moved fake rosy red lips up and down in time to “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic”

Which repeated on a loop all day over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over…..

Number 2: Odd job man - Pontin's Holiday Family Fun Resort - Blackpool, Lancashire

I promised myself I wouldn’t go back – I really did. The stench of ghostly chavs and greasy chips haunted every walkway. The sexist, racist mirth Roy Chubby Brown and Bernard Manning echoed the corridors, swirling between the sickening forced smiles of “Blue Coats” trying to get one last laugh and fuck from parting sour faced punters.

It was my year off. I wanted to find a job in some sunny shack beach bar and learn to surf… but I had no money - it was the middle of a recession. I was stuck in Blackpool.

So I meekly went and got, cap in hand, my job back.

This time they gave me a few things to do:

Painting the walls of the huts white.

Painting the never ending white stones that mark the road so drunk drivers could find their way.

Fixing the bikes in "Bicycle world".

Overseeing captain crocodile’s fun palace.

Caller on the boating lake.

Ball boy in the snooker hall.

But the crux came when old Ernie left or died or went insane - the management were vague.

The parking lot was opposite the dunes of south Blackpool. Every night the wind blew the sand onto and over it. My job was to shovel the sand into a wheelbarrow and take it back to the dunes. When it was wet the sand was back-breakingly heavy, when it was dry all but a handful blew off the shovel and all of it blew into your face when emptying the wheelbarrow onto the dunes.

The next day, whatever the weather, it had all come back.

One day - I calmly put the shovel down and walked away.

Number 3: Porter - Pontin's Holiday Family Fun Resort - Blackpool, Lancashire

I was paid 1.15 Great British Pounds an hour! It was 1990. 1.15 an hour!

It is illegal now to pay people that little but back then the fuckers could and they did. 1.15! Apparently we could make up the difference on tips but Pontin's is hardly the luxury destination of the rich and famous so on a good weekend we might push it to 2 pounds an hour, heaving heavy, miserable punters' bags of crap in the pissing rain though the camp's concrete huts ringed by a wall of broken barbered wire.

After the coaches had shipped out the punters back to whatever godforsaken northern town they had come from and before they came back with more we had maybe 4 hours to waste. But we couldn't relax, head down the beach - we had to help out in the laundry sorting sweat and piss stained sheets into stinking piles.

It was awful.

… and at number 4: Lab Rat

When I was a student at Bristol University I used to spend the summers there because as soon as I left home, the last as the youngest, my parents immediately moved out of the family home to a small flat in a different town and didn’t tell us where it was. (They did really… eventually)

Anyway Bristol is a very cool place to be and it is lovely in the summer.

I was sharing a house with my friend L who also had no where particular to go. Being the summer the dearth of rich students, who were off backpacking around Timbuktu or wherever rich students spend their summers, meant the pubs around were mostly empty and the pub I was working in could only take me on part time. L could only find a part time job in call centre.

“I have idea to make some money!” I said one evening “Let the University do experiments on us! Apparently they give you money and you don’t have to do anything!”
“Win-win” said L “Let’s do it.”

Unfortunately the University Hospital wasn’t running any experiments that summer. But we got a lead that the Psychology Department were running one.

“We want to test out these new serotonin based anti-depressants on you, see how they affect your sleep patterns and eye-hand coordination.” explained the researcher.
“Cool!” we said.

So every Monday evening we went to the Psychology Dept where they dosed us up with pills and glued metal electrodes to ours brains, wired to a recording device tied to our waists so they could read our thoughts. The overall effect was one of a scruffy cyborg.

They always drove us home. Presumable to minimise the risk of us being spotted sprouting a new limb when walking down the street. Or maybe because they were worried that if the locals saw us leaving the laboratory like that, they would assume monstrous and unholy experiments were going on inside and an angry mob armed with pitchforks and flaming torches would be on its way.

The next day they took us back to the Psychology Dept. Where we spent all day doing tedious eye-hand coordination tests.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if I got anything off the pills but I clearly got the dud placebos. The electrodes were incredibly itchy and the recording device made sleeping uncomfortable so I never got any. The tests were so mind numbingly boring I kept falling asleep during them so I must have screwed up the results. They could have at least given us Lara Croft or something.

L had a great time. He got the decent ones and was whacked out, off in la-la land every time.

Working out the hourly rate it was less than my bar job which is not a lot considering I was risking my life for science.

My 5 worst jobs ever

These things are always in reverse order so here is the count down... Coming in at number 5 is…. Agricultural Labourer

One summer when I lived up north my friend Clive and I decided it would be a blast to work on a farm. After a few tries, knocking on doors we found a farmer who said he would take us on. It was a mixed medium sized holding in a godforsaken part of Lancashire run by an ogreoid farmer - a giant no-nonsense Lancashire-man, his idiot eldest son, his even more idiot younger son, the village idiot John, the wizened 75 year old farmhand Stan and now - me and Clive.

It wasn’t really that bad – hence its lowly position at number 5 but there were some very unpleasant things about it:

Pulling weeds out by hand from wheat fields whilst walking in front of the combine harvester controlled by the mad, drunken village idiot John who regularly dozed off at the wheel.

Hours hurling, by the twine, bails of straw, with bare hands until they were red raw.

“Please may I have some gloves?” I asked the farmer once
“GLOOVES! Are you sum kinda poof?”

Clipping the sheep’s festered and shit, maggot filled overgrown toenails.

Checking the sheep’s vaginas for moistness to decide which were soon to become mutton.

However there were some wonderful things about it: working outside with my shirt off all day; working with nature - being in touch with it. After a month I had a fabulous tan, my body was rippling with muscle and my hands were two big calluses. Plus they let us drive around on the quad bikes and tractors which was great.

Stan was also a wonder: he was small, frail and never did any hard work but got more done than the rest of us put together. I never saw him eat or drink anything. He survived purely on the nutrients from his daily smoke of 60 unfiltered woodbines.

“Would you like a sandwich Stan?” I asked him once, offering him one of mine as we were sat on a log in the sun by the side of a field.

“Nay lad! These woodbines will do me just fine.”

He knew the cows well too as I discovered when we were trying to get a randy and very angry stud bull, who had caught his old chap on a barbered wire fence as he jumped into the field of cows we were trying save for him for the next month, into the farm yard to administer the necessary antibiotic medicine.

The idiot older son had decided the best way to do this was to herd him with quad bikes and 30 cows to pacify his mood.

“Aye lad, this won’t work.” said Stan said as he stood next to me watching the proceedings.

“He will get half way through the gate then bulk. The only way to lead a bull like that is to drag him by the ring, petting his head” he added in his thick Lancashire accent.
“Hmm…” I say.

True to Stan’s prediction as the bull and his bitches got to the gate they back stampeded towards us.

“What do we do now Stan? ... Stan?” I asked nervously. But Stan was a 100 yards away on the other side of the fence smoking a woodbine.

Well at least the others had a laugh.

“I have never seen a soft southern poof run that fast! “ They all said in the pub later.

Sadly my career as a peasant ended brutally on the potato harvest. A tractor pulled an evil mechanised trailer filled smoke and sweat that dragged the earth on to a series of iron barred conveyer belts up to us at the top where we picked off the potatoes.

Reaching for a small prized potato that apparently the la-di-da townie restaurants valued my finger got too close to one of the cogs that drove the iron bars. It ripped my finger nail right out.

“Ow... fucking ow” I said showing the idiot farmer’s son my bleeding finger.
“You should see a doctor!” he said helpfully “Can you jump from the trailer or do you want us to stop?”

Two days later I phoned the ogreoid farmer.

“Can I have 2 weeks pay because I can’t work? You know compensation.” I asked
“Compensation!! We have had women working on that machine!”
“Hmm... well that isn’t a valid argument either logically or legally. I can phone health and safety if you like.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have employed a southerner, especially not a townie southerner”

Fucking northerners!

Onanism

I love the internet. I love domain names. You can take two unrelated words, put them together, add .com on the end and you have a website where people are desperately trying to make money.

However if you put .net on the end you will find people who take the meaning of those two words very very seriously.

Take for example... oh, I don’t know… tantric and masturbation: two innocent and innocuous enough words you might think. But no, put them together and that little old .net on the end what do get?

http://www.tantricmasturbation.net/

Now, I like a five knuckle shuffle as much as the next man but these chaps take it to a whole new level - a whole different way of thinking about the hand shandy. If there was a wanking world cup they would be the super stars - getting huge endorsements from Nike – Just Do It. Hats off. These men deserve credit where credit is spurting out in creamy white globules.

Nuff said.

Love is in the fibre optic cables

Valentine's Day is all well good - fine wines, Belgium chocolates, athletic rumpo. I am all for it. I love the mush me.

But if you happen to be in love with a girl that lives in the snow a couple of thousand miles away it kind of limits your options somewhat. E-oysters and e-champagne just don't cut it. DHL will crush any roses and send little teddies to the wrong place 4 days late.

So all I can really do is let you know how much you mean to me.

You bring sunshine to my heart
You shine moonlight across my soul
And my body is lit with love for you.

x

Guardian Angel

So there we were - five grown men standing in the falling snow by the side of the road, toboggans in gloved hand, excited like school boys in the land of holey cheese, clocks, chocolate and stashes of Nazi gold.

The evening’s empire had been all planned out. A table at a fine mountain top restaurant to consume a vat of bubbling cheese and bottles of red wine had been booked. The toboggans that would take us home were here, hired and the skidoo-man was waiting half way up to take us there. All we had to do was get to the skidoo-man’s rendezvous.

The skidoo-man had said that he wouldn’t wait if we were late and as it was a 30 minutes walk and we didn’t know the way we booked a taxi.

But the taxi didn’t come.

“Phone them, phone them.” we cried “Otherwise we won’t make it!” - So we did.

Apparently the driver had driven past but didn’t see us. The taxi company said they would ring him again but they really needed to know where we are going.

“I don’t think ‘allez au mountain’ will cut it as this is Switzerland and there are quite a lot of mountains” someone pointed out.

“Now you come to mention it the way they ended the conversation ‘You English pigs!’ wasn’t too reassuring either” someone else said

The skidoo-man’s dead line came and went. We were cold and crest-fallen. Our disappointment was deep like a school boy’s when the school bus does turn up - it wasn’t going to be snow day. A restaurant in town beckoned.

Then through the low cloud and drifting swirling snow two beams of light emerged and shone across us. They were owned by a white van which pulled out of the dark and over.

The door opened to vision of pure loveliness. The stunning blond 21 year old female driver asked in a heavenly voice “Where are you guys going?”

“Hmm thing is… we don’t know where it is. All we know is we have to meet a skidoo-man somewhere.”

“Oh I know where that is - jump in”

The van was warm and comfortable and cosy, there was a box full of champagne on the back seat. Assuming we had not just walked into a Carlsberg advert we didn’t start drinking it.

“When are you supposed to meet him?” she asked.
“Fifteen minutes ago” we said sheepishly.
“He won’t wait that long but I’ll see what I can do.” She replied as she defied all known laws of physics speeding along the frozen Alpine road.

“How much will this cost?” We asked on route.
“Cost?” She said
“Yeah, for the taxi.”
“I am not a taxi.”
“So why did you pick us up? Do you just pick up men off the street and give them lifts”
“Only when the look lost and really need one.”
“Are you an angel?” we asked but she just laughed and didn’t answer.

We arrive 5 minutes before we left and the skidoo-man was still waiting.

“At least let us buy you a drink” we asked her
“Well ok I might be in “Le Pub” later but there really is no need” she smiles and speeds off in the snowy dark and mysteriously as she appeared.

The evening pans out even better than we anticipated and later we go to “Le pub” to find her but alas she is no where to be seen.

“No human woman would pick up five drunken men of the street at night like that.” someone says.
“Yeah - she must have been an angel.”
“That is why she couldn’t make it. Probably driving back to heaven as we speak” we conclude.

It's all gone Pete Tong

I spent most of the 90s raving in one way or another. But sadly those days are gone – the music dated as quickly as the milk in the fridge and well... hitting thirty - going out and clubbing until dawn, watching the colour distorted paranoia flicker across the 8 am faces of the Sunday morning tube commuters, enduring the shivers and the sweat drenched shirt that clings to you like a saggy second skin becomes less appealing as you get older.

But good days - happy happy happy ecstatic days.

So I thought an ode to RAVIN was in order. That crazy pastime of the 90’s that briefly leaked into the 21st century. The only musical scene where the people who played the music were more famous than the people who made it. The first real new music since punk.

It wasn’t complicated - it didn’t mean anything. But when the walls of thumping bass washed over you, sweeping you off your feet plunging you into the sweaty heaving human pool of the dance floor where you became one with the crowd, sharing that one ecstatic moment over and over again, one moment after another; letting the luscious music fill you - become you – then you realised that something that feels this good doesn’t *need* to mean anything.

But still some songs still get the hairs on my arm going.

So where to start?

Those heady embryo days of Acid House where the heat beats of Detroit and Chicago House were thrown into a big vat of LSD and British flare and came out the Summer of Love in 1988. When Camden Market was filled with smiley faces and bootleg ACIIIIID. When hundreds of very fucked and freaked out people went to abandoned warehouses and listened to very freaked and fucked up music?

No.

The teenage years of the early nineties when it went rural and ecstasy took over from acid. Spending Saturday nights out on the motorways of the north west of England – finding a convoy of a thousand cars all hooting the horns, grinding the M60 down to a 30mph pace, picking up packs of cars from Liverpool and Manchester, following some crazy bastards from Moss Side who had stolen a fucking lorry and were blasting out beat from its back, jamming the Police FM frequencies with pirate radio almost goading the man to come and find us and try to stop the crazy party in some shit filled field in Lancashire we were hoping to have.

The days when football violence stopped dead – when Man City and Lead Untied fans, who a few years earlier were obligated to beat the living crap out of each other on sight, were now hugging each other in the Hacienda. The days when the right wing press went hysterical – “What the fuck are the kids doing!!!????! – They will die! They will die!!” the headlines screamed. But we didn’t die. The conservative government at the time tried to stamp out this insane new youth movement by passing draconian laws. Suddenly generation E, unlike its predecessor generation X, had a political purpose- “fight for the right to party and have a good time.” If you don’t have that - freedom means nothing.

The consequential political protests inevitably led to a good old fashioned British riot – I would have gone but – you know… I was having a lie in.

No not that.

Maybe the wilderness years of the mid 90s when everyone suddenly got into brit pop and Oasis and Pulp and Blur were toast of the day but the lone genius Nick Warren kept the flame burning.

No, not any of that…

I am going to go for the Golden Age – The glory days.

Part 2 coming soon…