pull the other/any unsightly noise

pull the other

surely it's not news that democracy

is alive & kicking in modern Greece

or that the UK PM's phone was hacked

by a posh coke fiend on a butt of sack

not that a brat of the Bollinger pack

would call for a rag when his nose was blocked

or that Greeks would vote for early release

from a long bygone public spending spree

that German bankers still want their own back

though the roads to their summer homes aren't cracked

nor that Tories have been taking the wee

ever since they re-took the right to fleece

this just in guess what if the same old crock

of dealers ain't pulled again it's smile please

Chair Fart?

Available at all no-good chemists

Elis, the younger of our boys, asked if I had included chair-fart in any of these blogs. Chair-farts, or indeed, their overgrown cousin the ignominious table fart, I replied, being odorless, colourless and tasteless, are neither here nor there. But if he insisted, I should take a stab at writing one or two of them up.

To the average sock puppet, then, the exigencies of metamorphosing anima have deep significance. Just as a smell of feet – whether good or bad – permeates the interview room and lends it a special authenticity; so the creaking chair or table fart that punctuates any kitchen convo between husband, wife or lover speaks of taste in furniture, choice of habitat or quality of floor polish that has sauced or soured their relationship. Though sonic booms, for the present, are a thing of past concords and echoes from the future, something will have to be done about them if they are to have any prospects at all. Therefore, ignore chair fart at your peril!

Now I'm not one to snigger mischievously above six or seventeen times a day, so for me to snort into scorn the common-or-garden fart of kitchen chair leg on parquet flooring is not an artifice devoid of meaning. However my fellow men, women & children do agree, I tend to laugh rather often when nothing appears to be funny, and to employ underlined verbs precisely.

A fart, any given fart, is in any case a form of malapropism. Rather like the infamous actor dismissed from his repertory company for uncontrolled bouts of sneezing during performances – though he and his outbursts were beloved of audiences - the bogus (ie the raspberry tainted) fart which accompanies an academic dispute over the ending of Mozart's Requiem or a knife fight breaking out during the vivisection of genetically engineered mice is both impertinent and ridiculous. But people tend to turn dumb, deaf & blind; and though their noses may twitch, there is often a perfectly innocent excuse for opening a window or turning on the Xpelair.

In certain parts of suburbia, we have noted, a subconscious reaching for the floral spray can follows the merest hint of under-the-table indiscretion. Fart cushions aside, what was the last purchase you made in your local joke shop, Mrs Bucket?

Never Apologise!

Ich bin Charlie

Without Prejudice

some snakes

are no jesting matter quoth Paddy

to Prince our foolish Duke of Pork today

the beasts are neither as charming

in bomber jacket as suicide vest

check the crosses in their eyes

narky devils too well disguised

to be banished excommunicated

ice aged or parted from these

bloody virgin isles by Moses' rod

see you in court they snide

& here we're not talking grass or clay

but the ins & outs of the Quai d'Orsay

they'll sooner bite your snout as have

you look them in the mouth and say ha

SmallReads 500 Winner Announced

...Going to be Never

She had been through his sock drawer. Again.

   Up to that point, life was fluttering on - like the draft of some romantic turkey. They had similar tastes, friends in common, went off each other for years then rutted like ferrets all Tuesday morning. She held his hand out shopping, he trekked after her into the foothills. For half a century, they'd saved on rent by living together, plotted the home they'd always build. Kept their own spaces for body & soul: she to Conference, he on outings with the boys. Rather than outflank each other, they preferred to own up and keep up.

   Until the sock drawer. Again.

He shouldn't blame her, not exactly. He hadn't much sympathy either. In one sense, the crime had neither victim nor perp. It wasn't like she'd found his secret stash. The little he had to hide would never have been stuffed in such an obvious place. Anyway, she should have known to leave it as found.

   So she was giving notice? Saying, accept her little peccadillo or just bog off? He would have to chose. Which was going to hurt. He would lose his nerve, panic at departure. There would be embarrassing scenes, hell had no fury and all such rot.

   What else was he to do? Given her history, his drawer was the one place she should never have laid hands on, unsheathing it and fiddling about like she did. A bloke should not be reduced to the hint of his sweaty toes, to the impress of his low down heels. She should have controlled that crazy urge, if she wanted things to go on.

But the bloody phone didn't ring, there was no power cut, not a single pigeon came crashing into the living room window. In fact, nothing disturbed her from knitting a hat for Spring, or him from reading “Of Human Bondage” for the fourteenth time. He was distracted, that was all. He often was. And she was absorbed. He told his thoughts to go away. She was looking as she often did before bed. No point in reacting. But he did. All he had to do was put down the book, arch his back and yawn. She would wink and say, “You go through. I'll just finish these rows”.

   He carried on dragging his eyes across the page. His heart rate was already up when he stole a second glance. She'd had her hair cut shorter than ever. Another sign of ageing? Soon they would both be out of their sixties forever. Her neck strained as she studied the pattern. The hat was for their trip to Paris. The tendons either side of her throat tensed. The skin was crimped and could do with smoothing. It was bring up the bloody drawer now... or never.

   Phew! All that strain for Paris. And Paris was never going to be never. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed hard.

   He put the book down, arched his back and yawned.

trans. Klaus Von Bickerstaff

Always Say Never

Christmas crackers 2014

Christmas

crackers
2014

hi Q

in the name of all get out

look down on this work

& call a bad job well done

beware the boatman trailer

should you believe stuff like

supernatural superhumans

live the afterlife of goodies

& hell for evil doers or

that runaway girls are bed'n'boarded

by cuddly bears in deep forests

you won't need reminding the shift

from life to death's a homeward journey

strange as fact

a silvery groat

that sticks in the black

river mud of your throat

or should you believe in stuffing

like a full English breakfast

followed by naked

lunch sur l'herbe

then Xmas dinner at Woolworth's cafeteria with

paper crowns glass of plonk & all the trimmings

you will hardly need reminding

that to leave Santa a cute note

2 mince pies &

glass of milk

scores you a caped action crusader

with eyes that glow red in the dark

al Q

shirtlifters caught with i-dolls

will be shaken down

blindfold & cut to the quick

back to the furniture

while a wicca van

white as the driven man

crosses a hill

for the annual kill

dark clouds hasten

ravens home to their haven

buy Q

jingo balls buy jingo balls

at all the best malls

buy jingo balls jingo balls

not great expectations again

the burnished bronze

of their doorknobs

turned me jealous

a little voice said

unscrew & steal

them as scrap

another recommended

I wedded their big

brass daughter

middle Q

all who've read Hilton Coalfield's

Gotcha In The Wry

will know what this means by now

omniphobia

stuck on this planet

not a hitch in sight

not a stitch in the whole warp & weft of time

oh ho ho my perfect Ford

how on earth will I chill

out the next 2 millennia

lo Q

frozen monkeys not from here

type facetiously

random stabs at Shakespeare's Lear

safety in numbers

nobody's gonna top six mill

not this side of Armageddon

Stalin did come pretty close they say

above a gross snuffed out on his watch

but starvation & neglect don't egg the custard

like bullets in heads & nudes in gas chambers

no Adolf's on safe ground with his ½ doz

apart from a few discreditable deniers

casting aspersions on the history world

even those old spiders of Mars

won't count if they bloody show up

close encounters with death rays

only Google into acts of god

non Q

so come all ye faithful

the time to hesitate is through

the back door and down the fire escape

Let us bray!

Ali Baba's Pop Art Mart

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Not to be consumed ashore.

Disc. for Equestrian Order mmbrs.

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Alc % by vol may vary.

Try with Snickers or Flake.

Dissidents may contain pork.

Never Sold

Blood of an Englishman

Pull The Other One

Well, at least we can say Jeremy Clarkson has done it all now. If there is anything left for him to trash after his latest African fiasco, it will be hippo-posthumous with a capital H.

Ey-up, Johnnie boy, what ARE you on about?

Well, first of all, he invents Abongoland, one racist stereotype of a failed state if ever there was. Then he peoples its capital, Ezroibii, with modern Arab slave traders & belly dancers of dubious gender. I ask you! He pollutes a flipping great river, the A'bongo, which is another fibble, with crap from Chinese miners. He insults the Krauts by buying a souped-up Mercedes convertible sporting... would you believe... the Legs of Mann for a logo. And when he sets out in the said motor, to cross a 400 mile stretch of desert, he has the whole thing filmed in the Australian outback.

Oh you mean that Jeremy Clarkson? I thought you were talking about the car wash twit on Channel Fork. You mean the chauffeur twit on the Other Side.

And that's where he'll be right now. In his last episode, he roars out of Ezroibii followed by a swarm of surveillance drones. A couple of distressed white totters are chained up in the rear of the motor, their headgear fluttering in the breeze. Throughout the episode, they say not one word on camera. Meanwhile, the Mercs, like the drones, is bristling with mikes & lenses, into which Clarkson moans about the heat, the flies, the stink of camel poo and prices at all the Little Chefs en route. Pretty soon, with the incomplete road system they has got over there, the magnificent Boulevard of King Abdullah Al Malarky peters out into a delta of meaningless tributaries. And thereafter, in a kind of de-mirage, the higgledy piggledy towers of Ezroibii disappear in Clarkson's rear view mirror. This is all c/o CGI, one supposes. After that, our mad dog Englishman has nothing for guidance but the midday sun and a state of the art GPS system.

I am with you, just. Still in the land of Oz, are we?

Quite. Well the GPS packs up after the first bend. Then there's a bit of whirlwind, which has yer man stopping to close the roof. Of course, with all that sand flying about, it soon gets jammed and he has to carry on driving with the roof neither up nor down, half blinded and with a scarf whipped round his bonce. Next off, he ploughs into a cloud of dreaded locust, splatting the windscreen and clogging up the wiper blade. Even a couple of drones are bought down by the insects, making an extended action sequence of excellent family viewing. Apart from the language.

Did you take a copy, then?

Funny you should ask... what the hell d'you think this is? So Clarkson stops to ask some slitty-eyed Berbers – very suspicious looking mob - the road to Mandalay, but they are more interested in pulling his human cargo than putting him on the right track. As a result, he roars off again, leaving a great cloud of dust – through which the galloping of camel hooves and musket shots are heard. If that sounds a bit Lawrence of Arabia, what happens next is ah Eighth bloody Pillar of Wisdom. Out of the shimmering horizon an authentic Disney oasis emerges, complete with palm trees, poolside loungers, hoochie-coochie music and cocktail bar. In less than five minutes, Jeremy has pulled up in the mercs, ordered cool beverages, had them served on board, imbibed, then he's straight off again, swerving to avoid the scrub.

Oh, I don't buy that - “swerving to avoid the scrub”? The real old Jeremy wouldn't swerve to avoid the blooming scrubbers, never mind save the bloody scrub.

Quite right, too. But tragedy, of course, is about to befall our intrepid motoring correspondent. With only the blistering sun for guidance, (“Child's play!" - he cries - "By keeping the overhead sun to my right, I must be heading either North-South or East-West.”) he fails to spot a single proper road. And since there are no petrol stations on any of these tracks, by four o'clock in the afternoon his little two litre Kompressor is running on vapour.

Well that's a load of bollocks for a start. There ain't no such thing as diesel vapour. And, speaking of which, I see we're out out of fags.

It's your round, anyroad. See what they got behind the bar. Well, the Mercs comes to a rest under the only tree to be had for miles. It's one of them whatchamacallit trees.

I know the type you mean. David Attenborough has them in his garden.

I'll come to Sir David's part in the story presently. So Jeremy is still quite cool, basking in the shade of the tree and chatting to the totters (who keep schtum). However, there's a tiger, sorry coupla tigers, also lounging under the tree who are not too keen on sharing it with a Mercs, even one with Jerry Clarkson at the helm.

Oh, I get it. He does the old Tarzan act.

Sort of. Well, when the female gets up and snarls at him, Jeremy's not a bit phased. He just reaches into the glove compartment and pulls out a handy banana, which he throws in her direction. That really flummoxes the old lion, she sort of sniffs at it and then gives him a dirty look.

A dirty look? I thought you said they were tigers?

Tigers? In Africa? Who d'you think I am, William Reece Burroughs? The lioness then leaps at the car. Jeremy, in a sly move, opens the driver door on her side while slipping out on the passenger's. He takes off as fast as his legs will go. Having quite long legs this is not exactly slow. But the lioness is not fooled by the door for long. Pretty soon she has bounded after him, brought him down and pinned him to the desert floor.

I bet some viewers enjoyed that part.

Too right, they did. Doing Mexican waves from the hills of Patagonia to the shores of the Arctic Circle, they were. The tigress, sorry, the big feline... female... holds him down until up strolls her old man. Now the game of cat and mouse really begins. The King of the Jungle lets Clarkson get to his feet, but every time he tries to move off, bounds upon him again. The beast even seems quite friendly, puts one paw round his back and starts licking him.

They love their food.

And this is just a taste of things to come.

What did the lad have to say for himself, before the inevitable?

A-hem. At this point I should bring in David Attenborough, whose animals they were.

As pets, like?

Well, he had them mike'd and camera'd up for a documentary he was making. The whole thing was captured from the lions' point of view.

That must have been a bit of a scoop. So what did Clarkson have to say for himself? Any contrite morsels of comfort for his victims?

That's the dreadful thing. Every single word had to be censored. Right up to the moment his neck was broke and legs bitten off, it was facking bleep this, facking bleep that, quite shocking I thought.

I bet there were a few complaints to the Beeb (the BBC) about his language?

Got the Board of Governors out of bed on a Sunday morning.

Strewth, just goes to prove, you can't please all the punters all the time, now can you?

Filched the words right out of my mouth. Your round, I believe?

TT for now!

Turning Amateur

Turning Amateur

As hits on downwritefiction finally pass 10k, the proprietor summons his front of house staff. They assemble at a conference suite on the seventeenth floor of Sock Puppet House, expecting Lee to make an historic announcement. Peeled-back necks of vintage Champagne bottles stand erect in ice buckets. Sideboards belly dance with trays of canapés, fancy cakes & Belgian liqueur chocolates. Hundreds of coloured balloons, tied in rude bouquets, waft gently in the breeze. Several windows have been left open. As the crowd of employees roll in, faint honks of traffic from the boulevard below can be heard above loud whispers and excited giggles. Suddenly Philip Lee appears in person, raises his hand and opens his gob,

Now hear this. Yr ironies be darned, I'm sick to death of the lot of you, bloody shower of frauds, pseudos & time wasters. You're all sacked. Pack yr shit & leave.

Gasps, sobs, shrieks & bellows rebound from his words. A bevvy of St John's Ambulance men ferry out the faint of heart. Staff members queueing to leap from the windows are ignored by snotty security guards too busy helping themselves from the buffet. Hardened Ehacks, huddled in corners, give head to vapour fags & gabble into Moby Dicks. Champagne is passed hand-to-mouth by stack-heeled receptionists and lowdown office pros, swigging straight from the bottle. Balloons burst spontaneously. The sweet sickly pong of high end vomit mingles with a sharp stench of acetone as bewildered executives neck vials of pink nail varnish remover.

Meanwhile Lee has left the building. Exiting via service lift and back door, the former CEO and proprietor is disguised as a municipal dog catcher. In green cap and overalls he carries lasso pole and gunny sack slung over his shoulder. The streets are hot tho' not bothered, lazy sirens of ambulance, fire & police have converged too late to offer much succour to the dead or shocked onlookers. Lee ducks into an underpass that takes him to the far side of Punchnose Lane. He disappears into the district of all night wedding parlours and oldman early morning diners.

What's it to be, fella?

Two hash brownies, scoup of beans and eggs over easy. Gimme a coffee, there, too, matey. Oh, and a hunk of apple pie with molten cheese food.

Coming right up, sir. Sit yourself down & take the weight off.

This is the Cafe of Horlicks Wind Attempt stuck in the year 1974, patronised by homeless schmucks that nurse empty tea mugs, smoke Old Holborn butts and scratch. Radio cackles, too faint to make out tune or word, just the hiss & fry of distant galaxies. Yesterday's newspapers are marked & folded, phelgm chawed, yawns let out raw. Unemployment is kept alive here & flaunted like leprosy, women who enter abandon all hope, naked lunch boys shiver in long white trench coats, the letters FBI stencilled on their backs.

Incessant whirrs of Horlicks machines emanate from behind the steaming counter. Lee swills coffee and wipes his mouth with the back of a filthy glove. He eats slow with fork & spoon, paying with luncheon vouchers and tipping the waiter with fake chocolate money. As he makes his move for the door, a rent boy, old before his time, rises in unison. The blue skinned boy opens his jaw but before speaking, drops to the floor like a broken scarecrow. Purple smoke emits from the pockets and cuffs of his trousers. Somewhere out of shot, a cinema audience writhes in toothache boredom.

Back on the street the chase proceeds. A huntman's horn blares out as Lee hails a passing taxi,

Follow that hearse!

His yellow cab, lasso pole sticking from passenger window and followed by a pack of red-tailed vixens, pulls into the grim afternoon traffic.

Tallyho!