Gordon and my part in his downfall

Much as I wanted a hung parliament I was hoping you lot would convert enough Tory marginal seats into Lib Dem seats to create some sort of Lib-Lab pack, now we’ve got the unthinkable prospect of loads of public school boys who couldn’t button up their flies properly being in charge of the country. Oliver Letwin is organising the negotiations with the Liberals. You might remember him, he’s the bloke that charged you £2,145 to fix a leaky pipe under his tennis court. I haven’t got a tennis court, so I'm really pleased that my entire PAYE tax for 3 months helped him through this difficult period in his life, I mean how distracting must it be for him to toss up a ball for service knowing that under his feet a leaky pipe is creating an inconsistent flow of water to his outside cocktail bar. He has also stated that he’d rather beg on the streets than let his children go to a state comprehensive: what a charmer. Not to worry you any further, luckily this political genius is balanced by the outstanding George Osbourne, son and heir of the County of Tipperary, that man of the people, who when he’s not receiving brides from Russian steel magnets (you couldn’t make that line up) this future heir to a billion pound wallpaper fortune is charging us £1545 in Chauffeurs’ fares, so we are in good hands.

Whilst they break out the Kit Kats and get the butlers to roll up their sleeves in Whitehall, spare a thought for poor old Gordon Brown. Stood like Subo at the school disco, nobody wanting to smash their stiffy against him during the slow dance, desperately trying to romance Nick Clegg into a game of scrabble in the foreign office whilst he’s been promised Call of Duty 4 by David Cameron on the PS3 and a proper lads night in. Gordon, so long hidden in the background behind the dazzling Tony Blair, finally getting his chance in the sun, only to be eventually known as the man that told a Granny to fuck off behind her back: tough on grannies tough on the cause of grannies.

Getting elected is hard work mind: my three attempts for labour fell on similar stony ground: distributing leaflets in particular is wank; there are dogs that lie in wait behind doors to run up and tear the leaflet from your hand and rip in into tiny bits, thus beating their owners by seconds, this happens in such sporadic intervals that at the end of my time shoving them through letter boxes my nerves were shredded, what really finished me off was being invited in by a labour supporter, after 13 near dog biting incidents, into a living room that smelt of dog shit, to sit down for a cup of tea and a fig roll surrounded by three fucking Doberman Pinchers and a living room full of News of the World Dogs Plates. Luckily my campaign didn’t require me to be miked up, if I had been, as I walked out of this particular startling encounter, after being berated for not cracking down on illegal immigrants’ dog’s mess you would have clearly heard me say “fuck this shit” as I guess Gordon will be saying this this afternoon.

Bankrupt Britain

Getting the feeling that the real reason Gordon Brown lost the plot with Gillian Duffy was about her questioning him on the economy. She asked him ”how you gonna pay that back then Gordon?” and like a judgemental mother who finds her son’s credit card bill with a scolding tone she lit Gordon’s lemon because he hasn’t got a fucking clue how he’s going to payback the £51bn he’s spent like a sailor on shore leave. We think Greece has problems; at least they have Feta Cheese, Olives and Tourism we have no discernable national product apart from over-priced mock Tudor houses in Kent and in reality I can’t see how we can export those.

So here’s the real essence of today’s blog: creative ideas required to pay back this £51 billion. Even if we organise a huge European cake sale where everyone in this country sells 6 cakes each to our European friends and meets the cost of transporting these cakes across Europe out of our own pocket, we’d only raise about £100 million. So we need some broad brush strokes, a real blue sky fire sale of our most tangible assets. My proposal is we sell the entire royal family as a going concern; the lesser ones obviously get made redundant with immediate effect. We create a royal family that can represent the values of a particular brand ie ‘The Windows 7 Royal Family’, where we get Prince Philip to appear in the ads giving us tips on how to lock down our computer from the corgis and the Queen is forced to enthuse about the benefits of remote access. We sell Buckingham Palace and turn it into plush apartments for some Dubai investment group along with any other real estate such as Kensington Palace, Blenheim: all of them go up for sale. The benefit of selling them off all in one go is the hope when we get back on our feet again we can buy them back and let’s be honest it’s still better than my original plan of execute them all starting with the one with the lowest votes on a sort of ‘I’m a Member of the Royal Family Get Me Out of Here’ type show.
The we offer up the naming rights to Great Britain: let’s be honest it has huge marketing potential as a brand, I like the idea of living on ‘Mario Monkey Island 3’ or ‘Great Red Bull Britain’, ‘Magners UK’ etc. etc. Think of your own one.
I estimate that these measures would raise about £31bn in total including us selling 6 fairy cakes. Right what else have we got? Let’s get rid of Scotland: nobody would miss that and we could offer to cut if off and float it somewhere else, preferably with all the Westminster politicians on it: that would mean we could say it’s full of fucking dinosaurs and market it as the ‘Jurassic Peaks’ or something. That would probably raise about £20 million.

So looking at this logically, the only way to get out of paying this back is starting a proper World War and then invading much a bigger country with something to sell, mm sounds familiar. That or we can sit back, while these idiots cut health provision, education, public services, arts and culture funding and roads, whilst claiming back for every fucking Mars bar they buy, whilst thinking up each shit idea and treating us with just enough contempt not to tell us what they are going to do to repay the debt and then calling us pricks as they walk away.
We are doomed.

Election Blues

So tonight is the first televised debate amongst leaders of the main parties: have you decided who you are voting for yet? I know I’ve already decided that this is the most insipid and uninspired election ever: there is simply no choice available. It’s like choosing between, Diet Coke, Pepsi Max and coke zero, everything is the same flim flam knee-jerk reaction and dumbed down red top following bollocks. Our country now has the largest debt since the end of the Second World War and no national manufacturing output to resolve that. Our reliance on the banking sector and self obsession with the housing market and investment in property has rendered us nationally impotent to repay this debt without massive public sacrifice, yet every party seems to think we can trundle along like before without revealing the true depth of cuts in spending required to balance the books. Yesterday was a prime example of blocks electioneering where the issue of the day became a padded bra bikini sold in Primark highlighting the sexualisation of children? Really, I expected David Cameron to say down with padded bra, Nick Clegg to uplift the middle ground of wonder bras and Gordon Brown to once again support the minors.
What I want is someone to explain exactly how we are going to repay this massive debt without a national domestic product? Where the fuck are we going to get the money and exactly where are the cuts going to be made? Can we not have an adult choice between the main parties on this, someone to sit down and say right, bollocks to the arts, roads and scientific research, or a second choice to say bollocks to the war, national security and education or finally bollocks to the National Health Service and funding for blind people? Yes none of these are particularly appealing however they are all necessary to proceed forward and pay off a debt and I want detailed plans on how this can be achieved.
But what are we getting? Four step manifesto plans of marketing fuckety speak to hardwire fairness into British Society, I don’t give a fuck about fairness at this point, we are at crisis point, shortly money will seriously run out for nearly all public services and the only way to address this is a significant rise in taxation and I want to know that the people in charge are capable of delivering the best deal for us, not the incompetent childish nonsense of band wagon jumping. Yes society currently has a wide range of issue to address within in itself, but fundamentally we can’t do anything if we are effectively bankrupt as a civilisation.
I want to be treated with some intelligence I want to know the detail of plans, the reason we aren’t getting any detail, is they haven’t got a clue, they seriously don’t know what they are doing or how to put it right, they are stuck in a Westminster bubble unable to formulate anything resembling a good idea because on the whole the majority are personal failures who could only get jobs as politicians and they aren’t the doers of society we require to deliver results, we are fucking doomed.

Bring Back The Album

Saturday afternoons in the late seventies mainly consisted of me and my sister heading over to her friend Jackie's for us all to sit around her record player to listen to our collective singles. Being the youngest I had to carry over our box of singles to Jacks house, a carefully selected mixture of classics and if we were lucky a couple of newly purchased 45s from Woollies that we had got for 79p with our pocket money that morning. It wasn’t that we didn’t have a record player; it was just the Jacks record player would allow you to stack loads of singles on the spindle in the middle and it would click back and drop the next song and automatically keep going until the record arm was at 90 degrees to the pile of records or the records got slippy because there were we too many on the turntable.
I remember despite a historical amount of punk rock being around at the time we were mainly singing away to my sisters multiple Osmond singles, Abba and Boney M Songs. Jackie kept her singles in a giant toast rack thing where covers became dog eared as we eagerly created another stack of tunes to mime to with hair brushes around the room to.
None of us could afford Album’s, let alone develop the attention span to sit down and listen to one whole side of just one person. I remember my Dad playing Rod Stewarts Atlantic Crossing from start to finish and me and my sister thinking it was nearly the equivalent of sitting on your hands for an entire summer holiday. The closet we got to listening to a whole album was when my sister got Grease for Christmas and that just felt like a greatest hits package.
As I got older I got more educated with my attention span to music, two of the first albums I brought for myself were greatest hits packages, David Bowies Changes and Once upon a time from Siouxsie and the Banshees, these eased me into the idea of listening to the whole album as a complete work. Frustratingly the first non greatest hits record album I brought was Outlandos De Amour by The Police, which is basically the type of album that is four great singles and a load of shite. The real breakthrough came with Dare by The Human League I use to listen to that all the way through side one and flip it straight over to side two, with my massive WH Smith headphones at full volume, on what I thought at the time was a fucking journey into outer space, I had never heard of such weird bleeping and drum machines before I was mainly been use to Boney M, The Nolan’s and anything else my sister forced upon me.
Pretty much from that moment on I’ve always tried to listen to music as a body of work as presented by the artist, but most of the time I get the feeling that they don’t put in as much effort as I do putting them together. Take Park life by Blur, some great tracks of there, but the running order is completely shite and there are a couple of really duff tracks. The pursuit of the ultimate album that satisfy my required criteria is my endless quest, the criteria is simple, it must be able to take me on a journey, have tracks that all become favourites at different times and can be instantly related to disastrous relationships during the time of release ( the last one I’ve made up).
Incidentally Atlantic Crossing is a great album to listen to and not just because my Dad forced me to, I like it and it doesn’t remind me of him, side one is fast and side two is soppy, that’s me. Last night I listened to Radiohead’s OK Computer that for me is one of the closet things to perfection for a whole album it perfectly sums up the end of the century angst, loads of fantastic moments and is totally fucking depressing. Actung baby by U2 and I fucking hate U2 but that’s good, Wish you were here by Pink Floyd, Born to Run by Bruce, The Clash First album and Bat Out of Hell, all on the list of great albums, REM Out of Time, Carole Kings Tapestry and Marvin Gaye’s What Going on, I do go on!

I must confess with the advent of the iPod I am slowly giving up my attention span and in a small way I am still sitting on Jackie’s bedroom floor loading up my playlist like I did that record player. The difference is I guess that I can don’t have to carry a giant box around with me anymore or be forced into wearing my sister pink leggings for her friends amusement.
What's your favourite ?

Eating Popcorn with The King

Elvis has just notched up 75 years, or as someone kindly told me recently, “well he’s not 75 is he because he's dead isn’t he”, it is times like this that make me wonder why I am so indifferent to most things in life almost to the point of sneering, but when it comes to Elvis, I literally do lose the plot, full on proper mania and clearly I’m not alone.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t own a Wolf howling at the moon T shirt, a pick up truck or have a mullet and moustache, but I do own a £650 Aloha Replica Jumpsuit, I have been to Graceland and at the last count owned 348 Elvis albums.

As with all my psychological problems I squarely blame my mother. I clearly remember her coming back from the news agents on the day Elvis died, having brought every different paper from the paper shop, we then were made to sit in front of the television for the whole day to confirm that he was actually dead. This was exceptionally boring as it was way before 24-hour rolling news coverage and we were on holiday at the time in a little hotel. In truth I was quite glad we didn’t have to brave the elements outside in our shorts and kagouls but from an early age I was completely fascinated.
The weeks after his death and what was remaining of the school holidays they played a different Elvis movie after Why Don’t You on BBC1. At the time there was nothing else on telly, but still, I literally thought he was the coolest man on the planet; he always got the girl, looked good and could sing a bit. To be honest growing up in Milton Keynes with burnt-out phone boxes and punk bands in full throttle, to like Elvis was like my own rebellion.

I still get the childlike thrill about Elvis and in my later years I’ve really embraced it. I visited Graceland in 2005 and the morning after an enjoyable tour when they opened the grounds up, after a brief conversion with the man himself, graveside, I decided to take a dip in his swimming pool. For a brief few moments before the security guards arrived I actually swam in the king’s pool, but afterwards ejected from the Heartbreak Hotel and threatened with imprisonment, in what is affectionately known by my family as the Disgracelands Incident.
Sadly my bespoke Jumpsuit is now a little on the large side. I was going for the very later years' Elvis look, but now I’ve trimmed down to Comeback Special Weight. I still regret passing up the opportunity to own his Backgammon set after a big win in Vegas.

If there is a better record on the planet than 'I can Dream', then I’d gladly listen to it and in a way I’m glad that he did pop his clogs when he did, firstly the thought of him doing a duet on X factor with Jedward is too horrible to contemplate, shame on you McCartney, but also I would have missed out on all that fun when I was seven. Harem Sacrum is still the worst movie I've ever watched!