axburrows

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(Alex Burrows Comedy)

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“My Plague Journal”

By RICHARD LITTLETHOUGHT ‘The Voice of Truth, if by “Truth” you mean “Profoundly Right-Wing Assertions”.’

DAY IV

Readers, I do confess this self-isolation business is getting to me at the very roots! The other day, I was having a harmless browse of some of that P.G. Wodehouse – ‘fun for all the fam’, as the rappers would say. But several chapters in, my heart ached and a drowsy numbness pained my sense, as though of Benylin® I had drunk.

In my delirious state, I saw myself attired in a starched collar and claw-hammer coat to boot. My man-cave was gone. Looking around at this new opulent interior, I surmised that I’d entered into the employment of a top-drawer citizen: Mister Bertram Wooster! Distantly, I heard the tinkling of a bell. I pursued the sound up a long and winding staircase. I opened an oak panelled door and stepped into my master’s bedroom. He was lounging beneath candy-striped bedclothes, a little bell in his hand.  

‘You rang, sir?’ I said.

‘Now look here, Littlethought’, Wooster intoned, ‘My squeeze, Emily Maitlis, is coming round for supper later and I want to make a bit of an impression – if you catch my meaning?’

‘Indeed, sir.’ I said.

‘I’ve got a grocery list here for her favourite dish: Greek moussaka with a special side salad – Yukon potatoes, artichoke hearts and a caramelised fig – that sort of caper.’ He waved this scroll of decadence beneath my salt-of-the-earth nose. ‘Now be a sport and toddle down to Whole Foods, would you?’ 

‘Indeed, sir’, I intoned. I took the list and shimmered out.

Coming down Kensington High Street, the pavements billowed with a thousand coxcombs in primrose scarfs and crushable bushman’s hats. Through the window of a Wasabi, the Monopoly Man was licking ramen off a glass table top while a prostitute clapped. I turned and saw a parade processing up the road, at the centre of which was a massive Chinese dragon with the face of a polystyrene James O’Brien. Fire-eaters and acrobats pranced around it performing tricks, whilst Sandi Toksvig saluted the crowd from an amphibious rocket launcher. Jess Phillips played ‘I Will Survive’ on the ocarina. A marmoset was on Skype!!! I’m a stranger in my own country! I thought. 

Behind me, I heard a fragile voice singing from the doorway of an Alms House.

‘Jesus blood - never failed me yet - never failed m’yet - never failed me...’

‘Mister Farage!’ I said. ‘Whatever became of our Man of the Hour?’

‘I’ve been stripped of m’assets, boy. Stripped of m’assets.’

‘Wassat?’

‘M’Youtube videos have been de-monitised, I tells ye! All m’lovely Youtube videos!’ 

‘They’ll never get away with this, Nige! God’s honour, they won’t!’ 

‘Thruppence for a vodka jelly, will ye?’  

I was about to knee him in the groin and make a speech about the undeserving poor, when an affectless young man approached and forced a limp handshake. The young man then turned and gestured to a bunch of phlegmatic-faced tweens in furs doing coke off a padlock key.

‘Hey, guys, come on over!’ he said. ‘It’s a load of pre-gentrification First Peoples!’ 

They introduced themselves as characters who’d escaped from an Andrew Doyle satire. They were now surviving hand-to-mouth as a band of marauding postmodernists. They tried to impress me by showing me colourful objects from their ‘superior culture’, including Nespresso pods, scalp wax and a pencil sharpener from the Barbican Centre. A young woman in turquoise brogues read a poem about having adulterous sex in a library. When I told her I thought poetry was a form of character weakness, she cried onto her shoes (AND HER LACES TO BOOT!!hooho!). One tired-looking bloke – who claimed that sleep patterns were ‘just a construct’ and favoured instead a politicised version of rest known as ‘free-sleep’ – asked if I’d considered taking ‘powerful antidepressants’ to cure my conservatism. I told him that I was in love with my own sadness. I said I wanted to live my life ‘like a powder keg: short but sweet’ – I winked at the shoe-lady. The bloke explained that he wanted to live his life like an otter: ‘a very long and chilled one’, on his own, lying on a beanbag, eating stems of barley, with infrequent but carefully scheduled sessions of masturbation. I looked him squarely in the eyes and asked if he’d ever had a wet shave. The woman interjected and said I should join a Union, as ‘a working-class person!’ 

‘Who’re you calling working-class?!’ says I. ‘I’m a small business owner, don’t y’know!’

………………

I was referring to a small business I tried to establish in the late 90s, selling knock-off Toby jugs from the boot of my Mazda, just off the A13 trunk road. We got busted by a gang of hired bravoes sent by the Wedgwood company. I was left lying on the verge with a pair of broken legs surrounded by shards of homemade ceramics. The police managed to trace the bravoes as far as Stoke-on-Trent where the trail ran cold, thanks to a conspiracy of silence among the city’s terrified residents. I had a meltdown not long after that. In my despair, I overdosed on Vick’s VapoRub and tried walking into the sea one night down in Billericay. I was saved, after I mistook the inchoate outline of a miniature schnauzer for the spiritual form of a Toby Jug. It hovered above the sand, glowing. 

Don’t give up, Dick. Don’t give up the ju-ugs! 

But I can’t, Tobias, mate. The porcelain industry is eating me alive! 

No one else can potter like you, Dick! That’s the truth.

But the jugs have become a burden, mate!  

It is your destiny, Dick. The jugs are your destiny! Swear. Swear. 

What are you? Angel or Devil?

I AM IN HELL!!!!

………………….

Once I had absquatulated from the students, I entered the vast baize complex of Whole Foods. I’d never seen so many vegetables in my life [INSERT GIBE ABOUT THE SCOTTISH]. The building was at least 100 storeys high, buzzing with flying cars and hydraulic escalators. It was like the Tower of Babel itself! Fritz Lang’s Metropolis crossed with a farmer’s market.  

The affluence of the place sickened me to my very claw! I walked past some Houynhnhnms, cantering along the ‘Oats’ aisle. They gave me sideways glances and whispered to one another. 

‘Darling, is that a Leaver?’

‘Darling, do you know, I think it might well be!’ 

‘In Whole Foods? I say, do you think he’s here to get his methadone injection? Someone should tell him, it’s not that kind of supermarket.’ *Goya-esque braying*

I’m a creep, I thought. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.

Near an aisle of artichokes, my bum was perused by the ghost of W.H. Auden. 

‘Sir! If I may say’, he whispered, ‘Your arse is so muscular, I should wish to immortalise it in verse!’ I bristled at the scent of cherry brandy on his lips.

‘I concur, Wystan!’ crooned the fay shade of Lytton Strachey. ‘A truly delectable specimen.’

I swung at them. ‘Naff orf, you bloody wagtails!’

‘Oh, I say!’ preened Wystan Hugh.  

At which point the ghost of Jean Cocteau approached, his eyes gleaming like a deviant, his fingers wriggling, ‘Ohohoho! Il a un cul chaud!’ 

‘Now look ere, Frenchy! One step over this ere threshold and I’ll knock yer flippin block off, comprehend-e?’

‘Je recommanderais le chou-fleur.’

‘Watch it! I’m warning you!’

‘Oh, Jean. You old nag!’

‘Oui. Je suis un cinéaste.’

‘I can’t make head nor tail of this! I bluddy hate these romance languages’ I said to myself, sotto voce. I felt a stranger in my native land.

Once I had absquatulated the scene, I returned to the penthouse to prepare supper while Wooster billed and cooed with Ms Maitlis. (It was like the courting ritual of kestrels!!) Around midnight, I brought in the third course of banana shallots. The room was billowing with the scent of orange blossom and legal highs; I nearly fainted. Maitlis wore large, exotic torques from the Barbican Centre gift shop. She was hunkered over a big, indulgent glug of “Chateau de Liz Kendall”. Her eyes were as brown as spear handles!! Her face was firm yet glam, like the prow of a Russian oil tanker steered by Bianca Jagger. Her throaty voice, with its alluring masculine depths, was both thick and sweet, like oil on a scone (in an M&S advert sponsored by Shell). 

‘Your butler’, she intoned. ‘A bit wet behind the ears, don’t you think?’

‘Oh gawd,’ my master said, his saliva moonlit, ‘don’t I know it, Ms Emma! Hum-hum-hum-hum.’

Now easy, Dick, says I to mine-self. Easy does it now. 

Her voice sank deeper: ‘If you want to move in with me, Wooster, we’re going to have to find you a new man!’

‘If you like, I could fire this bounder on the spot! Just for you. I would do that, Emily. For you I would! If you’d like!’ 

She grinned and they stared into each other’s eyes for a good minute. Then she glanced up at me, a touch dismayed. Wooster turned around - he had a scheming look. 

‘Oh, fetch us dessert, would you, Littlethought?’

I shimmered out. I returned a few moments later with an inappropriately large jelly designed by Norman Foster. 

‘Ta, Littlethought.’

‘Sir.’

‘Oh, and Littlethought?’

‘Sir?’

‘You’re dismissed.’

‘Sir?!’

‘Dismissed. Arrivederci, Littlethought. We’re replacing you. Don’t come back tomorrow. You can leave your key card on the salver.’

I TOOK OUT A BOMB. I SCREAMED LIKE A CELT!

‘I say, steady on there, Littlethought!’

‘YIPPEE-KI-YAY, MOTHERFUCKERS!’ I intoned.

‘I didn’t know you spoke French, Littlethought!’

I pulled the cord! ‘FOR ENGLAND!’

Unfortunately, I was the only casualty. I wish I had died to avoid legal culpability. But it was a British explosive, so I incurred only minor tissue scarring. My master and Ms Maitlis immediately pressed charges. Because of my two-year-long media campaign against legal aid, I could only afford to be represented by a sparrow. The sparrow had yet to graduate to the bar, having only recently built his nest outside the chambers at Gray’s Inn where I hoped he’d at least absorbed something of the finer points of tort law. I appeared in court the following week in a plaster cast, where I was sentenced to life by Justice Lady Hale. 

‘Well, well, well, Mithta Littlethought’, lisped Lady Hale. ‘A Leaver in the dock, I thee! It mutht be my lucky day! Yum yum yum!’ (She rubbed her stomach and mimed eating me - which I thought excessive.) A roll call of witnesses for the prosecution sealed my fate: Kojack, David Blunkett, and Charlotte Church in a bonnet who jumped up on the plaintiff’s bench and called me ‘a witch’ and then fainted. Lady Hale said I was ‘weak and scum’ - or ‘thcum’, to be precise (which is Welsh for ‘seamen’, FYI). 

‘I thenenth you to 55 yearth, Mr Littlethought!’ she crooned. ‘55 backbwaking yearth!’ 

She banged her gavel. A loud cheer broke out across the gallery. I looked at my sparrow in his tiny little fucking wig, cursing him with my very blood. 

‘May God have merthy upon your thoul, Mithta Littlethought!’ Hale said. 

The sparrow immediately took wing – with my car keys in its beak – and escaped from a clearstory window. I’d lost everything. As I was bundled out of the courtroom, my faithful but still vividly puce-legged wife, Vanessa, surreptitiously passed me a cyanide capsule and an After Eight mint. She kissed me. 

‘I’ll never forget you, Monsieur Robespierre,’ she said. ‘I’ll never forget you – you – you – YOU…’

I woke up. My body was covered in sweat. It had all been a dream. I sighed with relief. I drew back the coverlet. But then, in the palm of my right hand: was a melted After Eight! Had it really been a dream? Yes. I had fallen asleep on top of a box of After Eights. I showered the mint chocolate off my cords and wept.

 -----------   b l  a  c  k  o  u   t  ------------

Grams:           ‘Underneath the   Arches’  (Flanagan/ Allen - ft. Dua Lipa)

CODA:

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“My Plague Journal” (The saga conts...)

By RICHARD LITTLETHOUGHT

DAY III

Keep 2 metres apart, they say! Protect your community, they intone! Readers, even before this virus, I wouldn’t touch my neighbours with a bargepole! (As Chief Petty Canal Officer for my local Barging Society down at the Thurrock estuary, it’s a severe breach of regulations to touch people with club property! Though helpful/dramatic pointing is permitted. E.g. ‘That way to Southend’ or ‘It was him, Constable!’ * points with bargepole at wizard/outsider *.) 

Pshaw! And now county by county, suburban conurbation by suburban conurbation, citizens don gloves, facemasks and hazmat suits to boot! Readers, I don’t know about you, but I came into this world stark naked and intend to leave it in a similar fashion! Public neurosis has reached breaking point; we’ve started viewing our own bodies with suspicion! For example, Vanessa tells me that I now must literally wash my p*nis! It’s like the last days of Rome, readers! End-times.

Jas listen to these new government directives that I’ve half-remembered from something I once imagined: i) ‘Do not sunbathe without shin pads!’ ii) ‘Do not touch loved ones after adjusting the crotch of your jeans.’ iii) ‘Do NOT wash your face with turds.’ This last one really smarts for me, readers. FOR HOW ELSE MAY WE WASSAIL? Come Christmastide, there’s no finer treat for a Littlethought than turning his cheeks black with the warm faeces of a startled colt, before stumbling out into the Basildon vales and singing a song about the corpse of a maiden aunt!

We, the plebiscite, are being coerced by sallow-faced apparatchiks from off of the academies! These scientists are unsavoury. I once saw Richard Dawkins at a petrol station in Chippenham, and his hands were chillingly smooth! I passed him as he was filling up his Mazda. I muttered beneath my breath: ‘You haven’t done a day’s graft in your life, Dawkins! ...What’re you filling your car up with, mate? Hand cream? Your hand-skin is a disgrace! You massive –’

‘Sorry, can I help you?’ he said.

‘Nothing, mate! Loved The Selfish Gene!’ Cowed by his boyish hands, I gave him a nervous thumbs up, took my jerrycan, unmoored my barge and floated away very slowly. It was the most excruciating ten minutes of eye contact that I’ve every experienced upon the River Avon (apart from that regrettable episode with “the starey beaver”). 

Well, I for one shall not be ordered by the warrants or decrees of scientific elites from the University of MADNESS (not to be confused with the former poly, University of MADNESS Brookes)!!! Civic life is comatose! Weddings have been held on Zoom! Morris Men are dancing on LinkedIn! Marmosets are on Skype! 

Anyway, The Mail made me write one of those lists of things to do during lockdown, a list I chose to write whilst drunk:

DISGUSTING I HATE MYSELF

    .

And so, to hammock!

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“My Plague Journal” (Cont...)

By RICHARD LITTLETHOUGHT

DAY II

These extreme government measures have bought safety at the price of liberty! I feel under constant suspicion! The other day, I was cockle-picking on the banks of Gravesend, when suddenly a massive silver ball emerged from the depths. It hovered above the water and overshadowed the bank, dripping like a sleek and well-bathed gonad. I addressed it thus:

‘Speak, spirit!’ ‘Behold! I am a government ball!’ said the ball. ‘A bit like the one off of The Prisoner. Who are you?’ ‘My name is Richard Littlethought! A bit like John Bull crossed with a Bugatti!’ ‘What?’ ‘Like a very right-wing Transformer! It’s my USP! O government ball, why must you spy upon me and my cockles?’ ‘Well… it doesn’t look like exercise, does it!’ the ball said. ‘It’s against the rules.’ ‘And what of it, mate?!’ ‘That’s some brass neck you’ve got, talking like that to a GOVERNMENT BALL!!’ ‘You balls have no real powers!’ ‘That’s not true! We can issue parking fines!’ ‘Well!’ I said, ‘Fine this!’ I reached into my knapsack and withdrew a packet of Sainsbury’s baby spinach leaves and began eating them immediately, hoping for steroid-like effects on my bicuspids, but to no avail. Seeing a middle-aged man with salad leaves over his face only angered the ball further, and it gave chase across the bank! I blew on my special Alan Shearer whistle! (He posted it to me during Mental Health week of 2018, after I sent him a dubious and SHAMEFUL handwritten letter where I confessed to my confused feelings about Ricky Martin! Dear Dick, If you ever ever feel upset at the thought of a trouserless Ricky Martin again, I want you to reach out! Find attached this special whistle. If you feel threatened, blow on it, and I will immediately take the first train from Sunderland down to Basildon and spend the night with you in bed. We can watch clip reels of my 100 best goals on Youtube together and eat cheese strings. Please; I don’t want you to carry on feeling like this. You’re a good bloke, Dick. A really good bloke. Graeme Le Saux once told me “Alan, another dawn shall break” – and it did. It always does. Ever yours, Alan Shearer CBE – former England International and REOCRD goal scorer. x) I blew on the whistle and nothing happened. That f**king Alan Shearer, I thought, what a flake. I felt dead inside. The ball absorbed me. I was imprisoned on an island. Memories were made. So many memories...

And so, to bed.

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RICHARD LITTLETHOUGHT “My Plague Journal”

By RICHARD LITTLETHOUGHT : ‘The Voice of Truth, if by “Truth” you mean “Profoundly Right-Wing Assertions”!’

Fig 1: Halcyon Days! When the NHS had cojones!

DAY I: IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT (AND I FEEL TICKETY-BOO!! hoho!)

On Sunday, I was taking my constitutional down by the historic maritime fort at Swanscombe. The fort itself is a local beauty spot, which overlooks the luscious brownfield sites and the sewage treatment centre at South Ockendon. I regularly inspect the vintage anti-aircraft guns, checking they’re in good working order. Sometimes I bring Vanessa, and she watches while I go round stroking the barrels and whispering things like ‘How do you like that then, eh? Lovely stuff, lovely stuff. Yeah, yer scrub up nice, don’t ya! Yeah, thas the way, thas the way’. 

Just think what it would have been like, readers! Using one of these babies! I monitor the waterfront and imagine firing one of them into the nuts of a Napoleonic sailor and making a pun about ‘seamen’. Then I march about the battlements, endlessly reformulating scenarios in which my country is in immediate danger. I point an imaginary spyglass at the shoreline and scope AOC on a raft with a suspicious-looking parcel – Kalashnikovs?! I look up and see Corbyn on the cliffs, signalling to her with a flashlight! SMUGGLERS! I fire a round. The raft turns to splinters and Cortez sinks beneath the waves with her booty.

I lower the cooling gun mast. ‘The revolution will not be televised’, I mutter. 

‘But it was only fudge!’ Corbyn caws. 

I light a cigarette and smoke moodily. ‘It was fudge today, Mr Corbyn’, I say, ‘But tomorrow, it would’ve been bolshevism!’ 

Corbyn cries into his beard.

‘I know that Ms Cortez and her fudge seemed harmless, Jezzer. But what about Lenin, sailing inshore with a Wagon Wheel between his teeth?! Can you picture that, Jeremy! Tito in a kayak filled with Boasters! Mao Zedong in a schooner with those little complimentary biscuits you get with your cappuccino sometimes! You’re a dreamer, Corbyn! A dreamer! You’ll never see sense!’

‘But we were in love, Dick! We were lovers!’

(Awkward!) ‘It had to happen, Jez! Sorry, mate. But that’s life, yeah!’

He sniffs and takes something from his overcoat.

‘Wassat? Show it me! Is that a weapon!’

‘Back off! It’s a fossil. A trilobite. She gave it me. As a present from the gift shop, when we went on a sexy day-trip to Lyme Regis.’

‘F*ckin’ ell – look, Jez. Why don’t you come back to the barracks and I’ll feed you some soup or something? Would you like that?’

He takes a deep breath. ‘What flavour?’

‘Nettle.’

‘You’re on.’ etc. etc. (A bit weird, but there you go.)

That Sunday, I intended to lay my tartan car-rug bestride the guns and generally commune with the fort, having myself a solitary and DEEPLY heterosexual picnic! It was the kind of “perfect day” serenaded by confused motorcyclist, Lou Reed. I’d brought my spotted knapsack, brimming with earthenware canisters of home brewed cider, 3 tins of pressed cod roe and a raw parsnip to boot! (Eat yr heart out, Mister Ottolenghi! Hey Nommy-Nommy!) I was in high spirits, readers. My dander was down and under control (thanks to a new prescription shampoo I’ve started using). But as I approached the fort gates, whistling the tune of a jaunty Al Bowlly song about lust, I espied a padlock and a cautionary notice to boot: ‘PARK CLOSED DUE TO UNSAFE GUN TOUCHING/WHISPERING! STAY AT HOME. SAVE LIVES! ALL HAIL THE NEW INVIDIOUS POLICE STATE (P.S. Freedom is slavery!!!)’ Upon further inspection, this demonstration of police assertiveness was in aid of nothing more than mass hand-washing – the sort of activity that might be encouraged at a playgroup run by Pontius Pilate. I fell to my knees before the sign and shed my dander upon the asphalt. Thus begins my plague journal!...

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A.Burrows 2016

axburrows.tumblr.com

I decided to mess around with the recent Beckham photograph on the front page of The Standard.

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Dictionary Corner

The following are (rightly) rejected submissions intended for the one-liner format off of the BBC’s Newsjack show. These are “new” definitions for familiar words and phrases.

‘Petrol Head’: A waking dream in which you think the Michelin Man is sitting on your chest and strangling you.

‘Rib-Eye Flight’: An anxiety dream, experienced specifically by butchers, in which a plane makes a crash landing and there are only steaks under your seat. 

‘Fish Finger’: Getting to second-base with a bream.

‘Detective Pikachu’: A complex metaphor used by Sherlock Holmes to describe his depression to Watson. 

‘Moomin’: An expletive used by Scandinavians when drying their privates. 

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10 Classic Boy Band Archetypes

1. The Cute One

2. The Soft, Sensitive One

3. The Bad-Boy Tearaway 

4. The Spendthrift 

5. The Nostalgic Retiree

6. The Vintner 

7. The Heart Stealer/ ‘The Transplant Opportunist’ (An actual crime)

8. The Elephant Man

9. The ‘Sultry’ Provost 

10. The Water Boatman 

Other Members:

The Portly Stock-Broker 

The Cackling Dentist

The Irascible Leather Tanner

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UNI XMAS BALL (itinerary)

UNIVERSTIY of Kingston Bagpuize (Brookes)

Christmas ball 2O19

Itinerary :

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DIARY: ‘MY WEEK IN BILE’

By RICHARD LITTLETHOUGHT

The Voice of Truth; if by ‘Truth’ you Mean ‘Profoundly Right-Wing Assertions’

Monday: ‘Oh, Woke is Me!’

In the words of homosexual songsmith, Cole Porter, these days ‘anything goes’! So get your ears round this crock, readers. Yesterday morning I was woken, not by the regular dawn chorus that echoes through these bosky Basildonian terraces – the song of the gull, the linnet, the sand piper, the collared dove, the coal tit – but to the tune of another breed of avian entirely: professional vulture, Justice Lady Hale. 

‘I declare Parliament hashtag open!’, cawed Lady Hale through the radio. ‘And there’s sweet FA that you can do about it! Fact! Get over it, grubby Brexity morlocks! Yah boo! Chur-chill was a rac-ist! Chur-chill was a rac-ist!’

‘Thank you, Strong-Female-Role-Model Justice Hale!’ slavered Nick Robinson. ‘Is there anything further you’d like to add at the expense of the licence fee payer?’

‘Yes. Please follow my topless selfies and politicised rants about menstruation on Bebo!’ 

* Nick Robinson clicks fingers in applause *

‘Pah!’ I expostulated from my quilt. ‘I’ll eat yur cheeks, madam!’ 

What a load of pocket billiards this is, readers! And all on the same day that Nigel Farage was fatally gunged by Get Your Own Back’s Dave Benson Phillips for being ‘a kulak’! [1.#Citation needed##] It beggars belief. It beggars belief.

Readers, indulge me here. Having spent the last three months living hand-to-mouth from a B&B in Dover, perhaps I’m a little out of sync with the latest glut of voguish Jacobins. Tell me; to what fresh depths has the Today Programme sunk? The second that that decent Mr Humphrys turns his chapped Welsh back on the show – like a haunted Mt Snowdon –  and retreats to his retirement home at Wuthering Heights, the production staff only go and open the door to this month’s mob o’worms!  

It was enough to make me scream into the sheets, thus rousing my puce-legged wife, Vanessa – that pliant Smaug! At that moment, my personal muscle-dog, Alphonso, charged into our bedroom and sank his teeth into the bakelite of my bedside radiogram. ‘Stellar work, Alphonso!’, I enunciated from my eiderdown. ‘That’s put a bung up em, the slippery blowhards! Ho ho!’

(NB: Alphonso is an ex-service dog whom I trained specifically to protect me from RuPaul! He can also count-out the date of Magna Carta with his paw, thus making him eminently more qualified than most British school leavers. Vanessa insisted we get him neutered. I heartily rebelled against the proposal and actively installed an additional pair of testicles onto Alphonso, which gave rise to the nickname ‘The Abacus’ – hence his ability with dates.)

Tuesday: ‘A Colon-stitutional Disgrace!’ 

Well, that’s the worst of them jemmy Remainers for now, says I! That was until I saw on the web that Caroline Lucas – a Pastoral Support Officer at a school for orphaned mandrills – has demanded we write a new constitution from scratch and in dung, and proposed an oestrogen-only cabinet to resolve the Brexit impasse!

Now look here, m’gurl! I agree; there’re boy jobs and then there’re girl jobs. But hand on heart, unless you’re gonna treat the hard-working British heteros of this land to a well-earned burlesque show – and god knows we all need a bit of light entertainment round about now – then this is nothing short of patricide! Unless you’re all gonna dress up in leopard print cat suits and make a video entitled The Rump Parliament, then you’re talking a packet of Tuc Crackers ™! 

Wednesday: ‘Microsoft Cliff Art’ 

Worked on my Mindfulness colouring book. Spent 7 hours shading in a squirrel’s tail. Needless to say I felt shit afterwards and drank to forget. Had to drive to Dover to feel re-centred. Once I was convinced that I definitely had a penis, I returned to mainland. And so, to bed! 

Thursday: ‘It’s Thursday, I’m in Love!’

Cor! Thinking about that Rump Parliament made me heartsick and no mustake! There are moments, proverbial dark nights of the soul, where I fantasise about leaving Vanessa for other women and I have to find my special space. I sit alone in our airing cupboard, slaking my misery with a bottle of Haig Club. An ether of Lenor and single grain whisky brings on a reverie of regret and erotic self-hate. Truth be told, readers, I have a bit of a pash for those lady opticians you get at Specsavers. In my fantasies, I am cashing-in my free eye appointment coupon at my local branch. I hear the fluting voices of oculists, seeking me in the darkness of the optometry room. ‘Can you read the letters for me, Mr Littlethought?’ 

‘Yes. “L O V E”. Which spells…’. 

‘I never thought you cared, Mr Littlethought.’

‘Dance with me, won’t you!’

‘No, I have flat feet. The other opticians will only laugh at me!’

‘Well… maybe they don’t see you like I see you.’ And I gesture at the glasses, clarifying the wordplay for her. Then she swoons into my arms, like a hake. 

‘Oh Annabella!’ I say, my eyes flashing with passion and possible glaucoma, ‘Let me ask your father for your hand!’

‘But he lives in South Benfleet! The last gig and pony left five minutes ag-’

‘Dammit, I’ll ride there myself!’ I say, putting on my tricornered hat.

‘Oh, Richard!’

‘Please. For you it’s Dick.’ I wink at her, but - as I roll my eyes towards my belt - I feel a lump on my cornea and realise that I am in need of urgent surgery. I’m rushed to hospital and she runs off with the county dog catcher. 

Thus are the disappointments of life. All my fantasies are disappointments. Oh well. At least I no longer get those night terrors where a coquettish Fanny Craddock materialises at my bedside and transforms into the ghost of a dust mite, mid-coitus. 

Friday: ‘Trigger-ed Unhappy!’

Having already been provoked by social media this week, it was perhaps a serious error of judgement to procure a pair of Google Glasses! But what can I say? I can’t resist a trip to Specsavers. 

The Google Glasses brought everything that I despise about modern Britain quite literally into view, turning my very sight into a rolodex of airborne Maoism and adverts for courgette spiralizers! 

My sickness came to a head on Friday when I noticed that Guy Verhofstadt – a recently divorced supply teacher in a perpetual fight with an overhead projector – tweeted that, after prorogation, ‘nobody could ever complain again that the EU was anti-democratic’. 

When I read this, I went to the bottom of my garden where I have a small potting shed. I keep my bicycle propped up against the clapboard. I wheeled it to the back gate and cycled into the sea.

Finned

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SEVERAL WAYS TO MAKE PASTA EXCITING.

1. Rename pasta, 'KAPOWsta'.

2. Give away free tortellini trading cards featuring semi-naked women holding machine guns.

3. In the manner of Rolex and Aston Martin, insert discreet pro-pasta product placement into James Bond films and have a scene where Bond throws some penne at Blofeld. 

4. Create an advert where a couple is lying in bed together, post-coitus. The man turns to the woman and says, 'How was that for you?'

'Great, thanks.'

'I'm glad.'

'You were amazing.'

'Ha, yeah- I guess it was all that pasta I had beforehand. It just got me all riled up. I've never felt so virile.'

Then cut to the man in his kitchen boiling some linguini in his boxers to a jazz soundtrack.

Voiceover: 'Pasta: The Gentleman's Choice'. 

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VAGRANTS OF ALBION: SUFFER. SUFFER. SUFFER.

By Richard Littlethought (The Voice of Truth! If by ‘truth’ you mean ‘profoundly right-wing assertions’.)

I’ve been hearin’ a wholelotta jibber-jabba this week about the unem-fackin’-ployed. Scroungers, cheats, pickpockets and students with arts degrees: that sort of caper. Politicians today would have us all cock a tear for these down-and-outs. But when the crap is cut and the dust settles, the real solutions lie, as ever, in hardcore Victorian workhouse cruelty.  

Those f*cking mendicants. Luxuriating in their spare bedrooms, sprawled out across gold leaf eiderdowns, awaiting a reply from a prospective employer. What lavish idlers these are, readers. Well, I for one think the unemployed should be forced to do all their applications on a bed of NAILS! And when they do finally get a trade, they should have to do it like the rest of us: you get up, every day, at 3am, waking up on a bed of nails, brushing your teeth with a toothbrush (made of nails), eating your toast and giving a parting kiss to your wife (who is a nail), before catching the 4am horse and cart from Gibbet Lane off the Basildon turnpike and having to sit on a further bed of nails outside your place of work for 5 solid, MASCULINE hours until the doors open at 9am, only then to be immediately sacked by your boss because your back is glistening with open nail wounds!

As for the limp-wristed Wagamamma diners of today who complain about my tone, I have only two words for you lot:   THAT’S   LIFE!   It’s the way things are! It’s the natural order! The law of the jungle! For example, when you go down to your local job centre, tell me, do you see the simple bay owl in the queue? NAH. Because the bay owl knows his place. BECAUSE THE BAY OWL GETS UP, ON TIME, ROLLS HIS SLEEVES UP AND DOES A DECENT DAY OF HARD BRITISH LABOUR! SWEAT STREAMING FROM HIS PLUMAGE, HIS BEAK ACHING AS HE PIERCES YET ANOTHER MOUSE SKULL. THESE ARE OUR VALUES. EITHER STAY HERE AND CONTRIBUTE LIKE THE BAY OWLS OR FUCK OFF!

I can imagine them, them, the ‘unemployed’- invalids, vagrants, indigents- lounging around in hammocks, the Queen fanning them with her poor, deteriorating wrists, and Prince George- a mere tot- mopping the perspiring brows of the work-shy. People of Great Britain.

END.

       THIS.

                 FILTH.

If my imagination is correct, with our own Royal family now so cruelly enslaved by the unemployed, we have to ask ‘is this what that roster of Great British heroes would have wanted?: Churchill. Guy Fawkes. Bin Laden.’ We need to end this sickening cult of liberalism and give this country a backboner. In order to ameliorate the situation, I pledge to set up my own brand of Littlethought job centres with inspirational mottos, such as: ‘Earn a crust or a beating you benefit raptors’. And for any of the verminous sweetboys who refuse, I’ll recruit the stripper, Jodie Marsh, to distribute a single white feather to the unemployed as a symbol of cowardice. Candidates will be offered work in those good ol’ fashioned professions: Whelk wrangler, Mudlarker or Executive Mule Scavenger. And for the fragile few who want to sponge off the state still, we’ll set up secret gladiator arenas in a wooded area and watch the beggars fight each other naked with sticks - offering Katie Price, bejeweled in Saxon treasures, as a human trophy!

I remember when I was at grammar school in my India cotton shorts, corduroy cap and satchel (empire leather). I met the school careers advisor, a Mr Arnold, who asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said ‘A poet, mate.’ I cringe every time I think of this. I might as well have said that I wanted to be a terrorist. Mr Arnold told me I was a bell-end and saved me from becoming Chingford’s answer to John Milton. What these work rejects need to understand is YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT OUT OF LIFE. Work is a means to an end and there’s nothing you can do to change that- just like death. So, UK job dodgers, torpid urchins, penurious dreadfuls: belt up! Gi’ on yer bikes! Put on yer overalls! Cos if you don’t do the job, someone else will. After all, it’s a bay owl- eat- bay owl world out there!         - Article found in a bin owned by Alex Burrows

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My memories of the 1951 Festival of Britain. Put on record at the Southbank Centre. 

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HAM EP.2 -  (2014)

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Lynx.

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Fig 1. The Solero Merchant, woodcut, private collection (c.1511). 

The Solero was invented in the 15th Century by a few canny blacksmiths from Dover. Originally, the ice cream was made of pure iron and forged over an open fire with a hammer. Served on a long wooden pole instead of a stick, the Solero was initially called a ‘Spade’ (middle-english for ‘wintery citrus treat’). The ‘spade’ underwent a radical material transformation during the Reformation and was consequently outlawed by the Church when a band of mad undertakers was spotted burying the dead with actual ice lollies. This was correctly identified as a Catholic practice and the undertakers’ bodies were later found suspended from Tower Bridge. This prompted one loner Bishop to make a joke in Latin under his breath. ‘Well,’ he said, contemplating the crime, ‘this is definitely saccharo-lidge’. He paused and looked around, thirsting for praise. No one was looking, and so he explained under his breath for his own satisfaction, ‘As in saccharo - the latin for sugar - and... because it’s a dessert. And ...’ But then he realised the other Bishops had now gone off to play ping-pong, leaving him alone by the banks of the Thames, the tide lapping at his pointy shoes. They had scorned him, but the Lord heard. Yes, the Lord heard and He got it.

By the Sword of Christ, in the name of the almighty Unilever & the body of Max the Lion (the Wall’s (TM) brand mascot), may God Himself have mercy upon these mad gravediggers (and the unpopular Bishop who needs a hug from the Holy Ghost). For without their incomprehensible folk burial techniques, summer would never taste as refreshing as it does today. 

Solero: Get That Fruity Feeling