The Fishwhacker Swindle?

Cliffs

2012-01-16T06:38:00.003+09:00

Tradition based on common sense dictated that we do it at dawn: the likelihood of discovery by a passerby was small, and although the middle of the night would have been even better in this regard, it would have been foolhardy to attempt the climb in the dark. Thurston and Field, the two boarders, had appeared over the wall where Quinlan and I were waiting and we made our way at a pace over the main road and along the rough path that had been trodden into the field rising eastwards beyond which gulls called and wheeled. We fell into spontaneous formation as we strode, Quinlan in front, the boarders trailing them and I some distance behind.

Half an hour’s walk led us to the cliff’s edge and we followed it northwards as to our right the sun broke over the skyline and bled across the sea. Leaving behind us and inland the tiny church with its graveyard, where so many former pupils and masters of the school had come to rest, we began a steeper climb than before, having here and there to clamber over boulders using our hands. Ahead I watched Quinlan haul himself over the side of a flat-topped rock and disappear. Thurston was next. Field, mildly overweight and sweating in the pullover he was wearing against the early morning May chill, struggled, his legs failing to afford him the necessary momentum.

‘Do you want a hand?’ I said.

He frowned down past me, then lunged once more and this time cleared the edge of the boulder.

The surface of the rock was flat and broad with plenty of room to walk about or even lie down, which Thurston did, making a show of basking in the sun. Quinlan shuffled forwards with mincing steps until his toes were inches from the lip of the rock. He peered down, then reeled away: ‘Whoah, God,’ his laugh flippant and tinted with genuine panic. The rest of us followed his example – we had to – and when Field turned from the edge his cough made me wonder if he were going to be sick.

It was a drop of a hundred feet, a pitted wall of limestone sweeping down to a rind of ragged boulders interspersed with shingle, not entirely perpendicular but sheer enough that if you were to take a running jump you could spring out far enough to plummet directly on to the ground below. The beach was closed off on its northern aspect by the curve of the cliff, and to the south a path sloped upwards narrowly for several hundred feet to join the cliff path along which we had come. That was the exit we would take from the beach, afterwards.

We stood in a loose circle, unsure what to do next and assuming Quinlan, the unspoken leader of our group by virtue of his height and the size of his personality, would guide us. He grinned, smirked almost, aware himself of how the power relationship had come suddenly into focus. With his fingers he motioned us to stand side by side with our backs to the north-stretching cliff edge which formed an immediately recognisable vista. Facing us, he extended his arm with his mobile phone in his hand and snapped us.

There was always a photograph, there had been one every year for decades, even in the days before mobiles and digital cameras. The reason was one of incentive: a boy was less likely to back out, to bottle it, once there was photographic proof of his having been on the scene. Quinlan peered at the phone to check the quality of the picture, then frowned.

‘What?’ said Thurston. He worshipped Quinlan and displayed his sycophancy in a surly, nonchalant way, his neediness all the more visible for it. Quinlan shook his head.

‘Thought I saw something in the picture, that’s all.’ Then, brightly: ‘Hey, probably Cliff.’

Cliff was the boy who had fallen to his death during the climb, as legend had it, the only boy to do so in over ninety years of the ritual. Nobody knew quite when he’d done so, common consent having it that it was during the nineteen thirties or ’forties. Nobody knew, either, whether he had been buried in the graveyard of the church we’d passed, nor even what he had really been called, “Cliff” representing a stab at a witty nickname. Over the years several boys had claimed to have felt Cliff’s presence or even seen him during the climb, peering over the edge above them as they descended or clinging to a promontory as they passed it.

The rules were simple. Each year, any boy was free to volunteer for the climb. Most were twelve years old. There was no shame in not volunteering – in some years as few as two boys undertook the descent – but there was considerable prestige in completing it. In order to keep the adults, the masters and the parents, in the dark about the ritual, nothing was written down, no records were kept; but you passed into legend if you did it, survived the throttling terror of the sheer descent with Cliff near by all the while. Shame, profound and never to be expunged, came from backing down once on the cliff. Once, in the history of the school, a boy had backed down.

Quinlan put away his phone and stepped to the edge once more, the decision having been taken wordlessly: he would go first. His face was unreadable, braced, as he lowered himself so that he was sitting with his legs hanging over the edge. Thurston advanced, frowning, not blinking, gaze fixed on Quinlan. Behind me, Field muttered: ‘Teacher’. I turned, expecting Mr Halliday to have appeared on the rock, boy-hating muscles bracketing his eyes and mouth, but there was no-one. Field gave what he probably intended as a wry chuckle but which emerged as a giggle, high and nervous.

In an instant Quinlan was up off the edge and rushing Field and with a punch in the chest he sent him sprawling. Thurston grinned, slapped him on the shoulder. Quinlan shrugged his hand away and turned back to the edge and said, ‘You go after me, Simon’. I glanced at his face but he meant the other Simon, Thurston. Field was picking himself up and dusting himself, face burning.

We joined Quinlan at the edge as he swung himself over, torso pressed against the cliff face and hands gripping the lip of the rock. The rapidly climbing sun was washing the beach clean of shadow below. There was little wind and the tide was sluggish, the low waves flopping on the shore and wheezing back through the shingle. The beach, the rocks immediately below us, were impossibly far, and staring down at them made them appear to wheel. Quinlan began to descend.

Near the top the hand- and footholds were abundant; about halfway down the cragginess began to yield to sheer expanses of rock. Terrifying though the first gropings were, it was at these smooth sheets that boys in years before reported they had first begun to panic – at least, those who were willing to admit they’d been frightened. Quinlan hadn’t reached this point, was twenty feet or so down, when his head whipped back so that he was staring at our faces where we crouched or lay peering over the edge at him. His eyes were dark pits of fear.

‘It’s so cold… can you feel it?’ he called. Then: ‘There’s something here. Something on the cliff with me.’

Beside me I noticed Field had gripped Thurston’s upper arm. Thurston flung the hand away.

Quinlan’s voice rose to a high keening. ‘Oh God – there’s something here.’

He screamed then, except it was too nearby to come from him; Field and Thurston had both given voice. Below us Quinlan’s right hand jerked free from the cliff face, the piece of rock he had been gripping spinning away and down and leaping off the rocks below with the tiniest crack. His clawed hand flailed and scrabbled at the face and the toes of one of his trainers rasped loose from their hole so that he was clinging two-limbed to the wall.

I broke away and wandered along the flat rock, hearing behind me Field and Thurston gasp and mutter and finally laugh, and from below came a shout of triumph. When I returned and looked down Quinlan was clambering at great speed down the face, weaving and skittering like an arachnid, until with a whoop he leaped the last few metres and rolled and stood on the shingle with his fists raised to the sun.

Fifty minutes later, Field having taken longest but having received enthusiastic support from Quinlan and Thurston on the beach, magnanimous in their shared glory, I began my own climb; and I shimmered down expertly, gracefully even, using the jags and outcroppings and occasional stumps of tree branches as a gymnast uses the bars, exulting in the supple flow of my limbs and the growing heat of the sun against my back. Once I looked up, imagining Mr Halliday to be peering down, but the skyline was empty. I’d set my watch and I completed the climb in a time that was a record for me and possibly one for all time. The final thrilling three-metre drop brought me on to the shingle and I straightened and turned to find the other three boys.

But they were gone, a three-headed creature disappearing into the distance far along the path that led up and away from the beach, their excited voices drifting back now and then.

I walked back to the tiny church and strolled amongst the gravestones. Church and graveyard had predated the establishment of the school by three centuries, but for the last hundred years the school had owned them. I stopped at one headstone and read the inscription:

George Henry Halliday, 1894-1960

Beloved Master, Husband and Father

My own bones weren’t here in the school graveyard. They were coffined on another continent in a spot marking a full stop to a life, bracketed by the dates 1923 and 2007, that had been to all appearances modestly successful but which I had endured as one of deep, pervasive failure, of abiding shame. Once dead we realise what matters in life, how the past chains us, and the discovery is horrifying.

I hadn’t meant to make him fall, Quinlan, and I was glad he hadn’t. I’d wanted to scare him off the climb, and I’d chosen him out of anger because he’d been so beastly – such an old-fashioned word now, yet so apt! – to Field, making him go last. Being the last to climb was the worst because you had nobody above you to look up to for support and encouragement. I knew now I shouldn’t have chosen Quinlan. He was too strong; I should have waited and picked on poor friendless Field, made him conscious of my presence and scared him off the cliff, turned him into a failure like me.

Until next year then, I thought, and I stood and walked away from the grave of Mr Halliday and possibly the grave of the legendary Cliff and the future graves of Quinlan and Thurston and Field and countless others, who despite their animosities and even mutual hatreds in some cases were united by the fact that here, in the churchyard and the school and on the cliff, they had a place where they truly belonged.

Told you so

2010-11-30T08:41:00.003+09:00

Here.

Declaration

2009-08-01T09:44:00.001+09:00

I will never, never, never ever sign up to Twitter.

Fun in the chair

2009-04-10T10:11:00.005+09:00

Missed me?

Like hell you have. You fickle bastards. You f --

be nice. remember the programme. breathe deeply

I went to the dentist a couple of months back. In the waiting room there were these pictures on the wall that were like Edward Hopper's - landscapes soiled by petrol stations - but with clowns cartwheeling across them. Clowns riding giant bull mastiffs. The tooth decay had rotted into my bloodstream, clearly.

The solitary other occupant of the room sat opposite me and glared over his magazine and said 'What?' He looked like Jimmy Destri, the keyboard player from Blondie. I said, 'Lay a question to bed for me. Did you ever shag Debbie?' He replied in an Upper East Side New York City accent: 'What's shag mean, asshole?' I reeled back, too stupefied to speak, my fingers fumbling at the pages of a copy of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. What the hell was that doing in a dentist's waiting room, I wondered. Except it wasn't; it was a copy of Cosmo. I read about fruit-based orgasms and about a new catwalk sensation named Claudia Schiffer. Hang on, she was new back in 1991.

Priti, my dentist, looms over my face and sticks metallic hooks and probes in my mouth. I try to tell her that my molar is seeding bacteria into my bloodstream and I'm delirious and about to die. She murmurs something incomprehensible and wrenches, violently. A whitish thing pops up and out across the periphery of my right visual field. Her Polish nurse shrieks and then giggles. There's a streak of blood on my collar (I discover much later).

It was burrowing down into my jaw, says Priti. It would have killed me eventually. Well, she doesn't say that, quite, but the implication hangs as pregnant as her distended belly. (Aren't these dental gases bad for unborn children, for X sakes?) I thank and congratulate her and exit, one tooth short for the first time since I was nine years old.

At the desk the receptionist tries to charge me and I argue that I'm leaving with less - one molar less - than I came in with, so she should be paying me. She says I'm a decrepit old shit and as far as she's concerned I can fuck off to the local graveyard where she'll happily lay a brown cable on my patch. No she doesn't, really, but she would if she didn't have to cling to her job in this climate. I take comfort from the fact that I at least have two eyes whereas she has a painted pebble askew in her left socket and one ear missing. No she doesn't, I'm just bitter.

I went home in pain. The superior half and the baby were away visiting on the other side of town and, it being a Friday evening, I cracked open a bottle of Cape pinotage and watched Nosferatu the Vampyre, the 1979 Werner Herzog remake. Klaus Kinski's count has a perfect pair of rat-like incisors in this film.

Before the Rapture: a picture-post in three acts

2008-10-17T07:34:00.005+09:00

The rapture is nigh

2008-09-10T07:18:00.004+09:00

THIS BLOG WILL BE RELAUNCHING SHORTLY AS A HOLY CHRISTIAN SITE.

STAY TUNED.

WTF?

2008-06-07T06:05:00.003+09:00

Would someone post something here, please? Jesus, it's been over three months. I might not have access to a computer here under the bridge but I do get out into town once in a while, you know.

The nads

2008-03-01T10:23:00.006+09:00

Doesn't it just prove how wonderful the English language is that the word 'bollocks' can be made to mean the exact opposite by the insertion of the definite article before it?

Five things that are, indeed, THE bollocks:

1. This film, Primer. It's retro-looking, achingly indie, and utterly incomprehensible if you try to watch it pissed, which I assume is how most of you watch films. (It's what I do.) Sober, it's still incomprehensible, but a little more frightening. I gather it starts making sense after three viewings, if you've an IQ above 157. Nevertheregardless, it's a supremely original piece of filmmaking and, in its own clever way, enthralling.

2. We Need To Talk About Kevin. This book won some prize or other, and although most award-winning novels tend to be awesomely self-congratulatory and profoundly unreadable in equal measure, the equivalent of copying out Paradise Lost in your own semen while orbiting Saturn, this one is a masterpiece. Gripping, awe-inspiring from start to finish, with a final twist that leaves you reeling about the room with eyes and mouth agape at the author's chutzpah, this is easily the finest example of populist highbrow literature since Dickens. Read it, and thank God that Lionel Shriver doesn't have any children in your neighbourhood.

3. Marriage. Call me a sentimental arse, but some of the rough edges have definitely been knocked off my personality since I tied the knot at a relatively late age a year and a half ago. I always thought freedom was incompatible with being hitched to another person. Now I understand that 'hitched' is what you mean it to mean.

4. A scrambled egg and bacon sandwich. You have to make this with three eggs, two rashers of bacon and one ounce of butter (not margarine, not lard or anything else) per person. Fire up a shallow saucepan on a low heat and put in the butter (French, unsalted). Once it's coated the pan, add the eggs, lightly beaten beforehand, and stir them continuously with a wooden spoon or, if you must, a spatula. Meanwhile, grill the bacon rashers, preferably in a George Foreman machine because bacon really does taste better once you've siphoned away the fat. I do like Danish bacon, but British is fine too. Don't try any other countries' offerings. While you're stirring the eggs in the pan (don't stop!), remove two slices of bread per person from the packet to let them breathe. I tend to choose wholemeal bread, but this is really a matter of taste. On no account toast the bread before serving - if you want toast you need to follow another recipe. Back to the eggs: it usually takes around five minutes to scramble three to six eggs properly. The sly trick is to add a small twist of butter to the mix about thirty seconds before taking the whole thing off the hob. Then serve it all up, adding ground pepper to taste (I advise it) and HP Sauce - note that it must be HP, not Daddies or any such pretender to the brown sauce throne; and please, for the love of God, avoid the use of tomato ketchup which in this dish is an abomination akin to the daubing of pig's blood on the walls of a mosque or a synagogue. Apply the upper layer of bread, cut diagonally and eat. Then die, because you'll never experience such ecstasy again.

5. The Waterboys. I met Mike Scott once and he's an incredibly nice guy, self-effacing and kindly. Their music is joyous, melodic and sublime, yet has a far harder edge than you'd expect, especially when you hear them live. Listen to And A Bang On The Ear and try to resist playing air-violin.

Challinor's challenge

2008-02-02T11:06:00.000+09:00

Evidently it's etiquettesque to respond to this kind of post so I'll comply. Philip would like me to be nice for a change, so here are seven things I'm in favour of (the 'don't end a sentence with a preposition' rule was apparently imposed by Gallic linguofascists in the 18th century, so fuck that for a game of legionnaires):

1. The Labour Party

I can't let a single thought about them flit across my consciousness without falling to my knees, loosening my belt and masturbating volcanically. The Labour Party have turned what was a nation in terminal decline for a thousand years into an economic, social and sexual powerhouse. The smiles on the faces of the health staff are broader, the operation scars on the vic... the patients are less infected, and the hard-ons paraded around the halls of Whitehall are more rampant than in the 950-odd years since King Harold never recovered from that mother of all symbolic cumshots in his eye. Finally, we have a leader who will stand up against the tyranny of binocular vision. Go get 'em (from one side), Gordon! (etc, etc)

2. The Conservative Party

The sight of David Cameron on the television drives me into the streets, weeping with excitement at the new dawn he promises! O David, you are truly worthy of your namesake, opposed as you are to your political Goliath. Just sling a few of those stunningly original projectiles of yours at his forehead - those 'er... you naughty Muslim bombers' or 'umm... I think you should try to cut down on your carbon climates, chaps' or 'thank Christ, one of you has paid his son for doing nothing - now that's something I can actually understand!' - and the populace will line up behind you and usher you in come 2010. Then we can all bend over again for another five years, till Labour start nudging you and you feel the need to take down Syria. (etc, etc)

3. Sarcasm

(The sarcasm ends here)

4. Amateur dramatics

Do yourself a favour and hie you to your local am-dram group. Every town has one - every town, every village, every hamlet, every borough, even, for you townies - so you can stick that excuse. The great thing about these groups is not the excitement they allow you to experience when you stand on stage playing Willie Loman or Hamlet or the third German or whoever; it's the spirit of community they foster. My group is wonderful: we meet two or three times a week, and whether we're the lead actor or the lowliest prop supplier for that production (and we take turns), we're all equal when we're out on the street touting for revenue or in the pub knocking back the pints after a great, great show.

5. Victorian novels

I know it's not very fashionable to read these books nowadays - James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and that crowd and their drooling followers have pretty much fucked this genre over - but if you're stuck for a good read on a beach, on a long train journey or in the bay window of your Wiltshire manse on a drenched winter afternoon, you could do worse than an 'old Vic'. I've just read Bleak House for the second time, and it kicks arse, all 1,012 pages of it. Nicholas Nickelby is just as good (and features the best - and perviest - character name in all of fiction: Wackford Squeers). David Copperfield is good but overrated; Great Expectations and Hard Times are brilliant. But then so is anyone who debates Dickens, no matter what your preferences. Wilkie Collins is stunning, and Thomas Hardy astonishes... but George Eliot soars over all of them, Middlemarch triumphing as the greatest work of fiction in the history of Western literature. Mmmmm - mm! Do your mind a favour and give them a try.

6. Stevie Ray Vaughan

He was the greatest guitarist who ever lived, a shy, humble man who squeezed more elegant, complicated and downright stinking riffs out of his Fender Strat that any other human has ever managed. He would have died if he hadn't kicked his alcohol and cocaine habits in 1986; then he went on to get himself killed in a helicopter crash in 1990. Listen to what I think is his magnum opus, The Things That I Used To Do, and try to suppress the gooseflesh that creeps down your spine during the guitar solo in the middle. I dare you. Rest in peace, Stevie.

7. Michael Moore

I've always hated this bastard. His political rants are crap. Fair enough, he nailed Bush's zombie-like reaction to the news of the 9-11 attacks; but he's been skewered comprehensively as a third-rate polemicist by the counterblast film, Manufacturing Dissent. Nonetheless, I watched his latest, Sicko, last night. The problem with this bloody film is that Moore hasn't grasped anything, in years of filmmaking, about the principles of scientific analysis. To establish an idea scientifically, you have to do a power calculation. This means, to simplify things, that there's a minimum number of examples you have to offer before your hypothesis approaches credibility. Moore puts forward horrendous examples of people who have been screwed over by the American health-insurance-based system; but he uses these four or five instances to make gross generalisations about healthcare in America. The US healthcare system might be utterly awful, for all I know; it's just that Moore fails to come anywhere near proving this. More egregiously, he reveals himself to be a dualist of the sort he's always criticising. According to him in this film, everything the US ever does is wrong, and everything anyone else does - Britain, France, Canada and Cuba - is sublimely altruistic, unassailable and, well, perfect. Never mind that Britain has the lowest cancer survival rates in the Western world, far lower than those of, say, Holland, or the dreaded America (I'm happy to provide figures if anyone doubts this). Or that the rate of getting shot in the back on trying to escape the host country is just that bit higher in Cuba than in any of the other countries featured in Moore's film.

And yet... At the end of the film, right at the end, when Moore is waddling up to the Capitol in Washington on some dimwitted crusade to force the federal government to do his laundry or some such crap.... he has as the soundtrack Cat Stevens's Don't Be Shy. Now, I'm not a hippy. I was born in 1970, and as far as I was concerned when I reached adulthood in 1988 and then again in 1991, the hippies could kiss my ring, and I'm not using ecclesiastical imagery here. But I've always loved that Cat Stevens song, since about 1979, I think, when I was nine. It's always resonated in me as a sort of anthem to people like me, people who are misfits in some way - shy, awkward, afraid to ask out girls or approach potential friends, people who have minds foaming with ideas and music and joy who nonetheless never know quite how to communicate these ideas to other human beings. People who identify intensely with the Counting Crows song Mr Jones, as I do. Profoundly interesting people like, I suspect, almost all the bloggers I link to on the left there.

And listening to that utterly beautiful Cat Stevens song, written as it was in 1971, I understood that Michael Moore isn't really the irredeemable, sneering bastard I've always thought he was, even though I disagree profoundly with his politics and most of his conclusions. In fact, his perceptiveness in choosing that song makes me wonder if he hasn't started to have doubts about his own position (i.e. that the US is automatically bad in everything it does and the rest of the world is by default wonderful). My own take is: the human race is chaotic, haphazard, at times brilliant, self-destructive, good most of the time, self-serving and nasty slightly less of the time on the whole, wherever it's found, in Europe or Asia or Africa or America or wherever else. We're all in the same fucking boat, people, so let's not blow each other up in trains or bomb each other from the skies. And let's not mix our metaphors, please, for Christ's sake.

Update!

I forgot to tag people! So let's hear seven things you're in favour of, Sarah, Dr Maroon, Pat, Sam, FMC, Boudica and (ah ha ha haaaa, yeah, right) Noreen.

Boris: my heroin

2008-01-30T09:47:00.000+09:00

While putting together the rest of the story I started in my last post, I have decided to emulate some of London's mayoral candidates and recommence using heroin.

Yes, I know. I'm sorry. 'Recommence' is such an ugly, Latinate word. I should have said 'start... again'. My bad, as they say.

I can't help it, really. The smack use, I mean. Three months of listening to the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop. Failing to dodge billboards with Kate and Pete Moss's drawn, fucked faces. Economic collapse. Utterly stupid, self-deluding, self-righteous non-entities, drunk with power, robbing us blind and clinging to their jobs because nobody gives a rat's arse, really. Our glass-eyed leader, his fingers steepled before him as his rotten, feculent dream decays before his eyes.

Vote Boris, if you can, and if you want more hard drugs on the streets. At least that way you don't have to be conscious when it all hits the fan.

I'm sorry, I think I'm going to be

aaaeeeeuuuurrrgrgghhh

The Case of the Christmas Bracelet (part one of four)

2007-12-15T09:02:00.000+09:00

From Foot Eater's case files, a Yuletide yarn to shiver your cockles!

ONE

Christmas of 1951 started out a real son-of-a-bitch and just got worse. On December 24 Marylou left me, raging out the door in a hurricane of shattered hopes and broken crockery, her last words ringing in my ears: ‘You’re a b___d, I hate you, I never want to see you again.’ I faced a bleak and empty New Year. Receptionists like her are hard to come by.

Then, in the afternoon, the phone rang. I was sitting on the window sill at the time, so entranced by the beautiful snowy city landscape outside that I didn’t think I’d ever turn away from it. My sill is so narrow that I get wedged in there and have to exert a real effort to extract myself off of it. Lost as I was in romantic thoughts, when I heard the shrilling of the phone I thought for a crazy moment it was someone calling to say I’d won the lottery or something, and I got so excited I managed to pull myself off. It was my doctor.

‘Foot,’ he said, ‘I know it’s Christmas Eve and all, but you really need to think about booking that liver transplant.’

‘Liver transplant, schmiver transplant,’ I said, thinking of my bank balance. I hadn’t had a real case in months.

‘Mmm. Raspy,’ he said. ‘Let me schedule you for a trachea replacement while we’re at it.’

We made small talk for a while and I thanked him for the case of bourbon and carton of Luckies he’d sent me as a Christmas present, before hanging up. He was a good old doc, really; he’d done my appendix and haemorrhoid transplants and had fixed up my heart after that comic book business three years earlier. Rumor had it he occasionally mixed up his autopsies and his prostatectomies, but nobody’s perfect.

At six o’clock that evening I was sitting in my office in my favorite – heck, my only – armchair, a bottle of Jack Daniel plugged into my normally cheery but by now terminally morose face, and thinking about wandering down to the mean streets in search of something hot and dirty to stick in my mouth (I’d just run out of cigarettes) when Pussy the cat dropped in through the window I kept cranked open a few inches despite the winter freeze to let some air in. I don’t mean my cat dropped in to let some air in; I just have difficulties with clauses and commas and the like, G-d damn it. I stared at Pussy. She was sodden and had something in her mouth. And she stank. It was a long time since I’d been in the same room with a pussy that was dripping wet and smelling of fish. I reached down and tossed her a mouse corpse I’d been meaning to throw out since last week and she dove for it, dropping what she’d brought in. I leaned forward to look at it.

It was a bracelet, gold or at any rate gold-plated, and although it was dirty with some kind of seaweed or pond scum it was still in good shape. I picked it up and rubbed it clean on my sleeve. There was something engraved on the inner surface. I peered at it in the flinty light that angled between the slats of the blinds, and the p-s turned to ice in my bl-dder.

Flashback time. I was a runty nine-year-old, way back before you’d remember, before Prohibition, even, sitting on the banks of the Mississippi watching the steamers crawl by like mechanical cockroaches the size of elephants. Pappy had gone off to war in Europe and I was tasked with defending the freehold against the bandits and human varmints that threatened to come kill my momma and sister and do the uh-uh-uh thing with our hogs and carry me off to a life of white slavery in Huckleberry-Twainsville upriver. I was balanced in the crook of a tree with Pappy’s double-ought Winchester loaded and propped across my lap and a straw hat pulled low over my eyes to shield out the flies and the July sun. Except there were no flies and there weren’t no July sun neither.

Soon enough a fat guy came strolling over the river. He wasn’t Jesus, walking on water; he had a beard, I’ll allow that, but he was dressed kind of weird and his water-walking weren’t no miracle seeing how the ’Sippi was frozen over and all. ‘Hey there, you, boy,’ he hollered.

I pulled the triggers. The shot went way wild. When the noise had cleared and the blue smoke had dispersed a little, he cussed in a fashion I hadn’t never heard before and yelled, ‘Holy h-ll, boy. You some kind of a a—hole?’

‘What do you mean, sir?’ There was a queer smell in the air, like when someone makes poopy-kaka in his pants, and it wasn’t me.

‘I mean, you’re sittin out here dressed like it’s high summer.’

‘Ain’t it?’ I was getting edgy seeing how this stranger was looking at me all funny. Holding his gaze, I reloaded.

‘No. It’s late December.’ He stepped forward. He looked scared, but also astonished, sort of. He put a hand on his chest.

‘Don’t you know who I am?’

‘Naw.’ I tried to think what my Pappy would of done, even though he was over in France killing Kaisers. This guy weren’t no obvious varmint nor no prevert neither but nonetheless he was mighty weird. He started to reach inside his jacket and I decided my Pappy would of shot him so I gave him both barrels, right in the face. His head done come clean off and it was all red inside, like his clothes. He landed on his large a-s on the frozen ground. I went over to him, the blast of the shotgun still whining high in my ears, and poked the barrels at his hand till it uncurled. I saw a lollipop in his open fist. Probably a prevert after all. Round his wrist something glittered, gold. I stooped to look at it. It was a bracelet, like what medicals and asthmatics and epileptics wear. On the reverse side it said (I read good, even as a boy): Santa Claus.

'S--t,' I said. The echo of the word skittered across the iced river surface like a series of skimmed hyphens. I lit a cigarette.

The horror, the horror

2007-12-09T09:30:00.000+09:00

As you might imagine, a prolonged absence such as mine has resulted in a bulging womb of incipient mail-progeny. What I mean is, you fans have been sending in your letters, texts and emails of concern, devotion and, yes, love, with a freneticism that warms my cockles and at the same time makes me question your collective mental health.

I've decided to use this blog to wage war on slovenly, pig-ignorant perversions of English grammar, spelling and punctuation in the new year, and as a taster I thought I'd hold some of your missives up to ridicule. Feel free to hoist me by my own petard if you can, you ignorami.

Kicking off, sycophant@yahoo.com emails:

You're brilliant in every way. Tell me, please, do you only write comedy?

No, 'sycophant'. I watch it on television and in live settings, read it, laugh at it, deride it, appreciate it, and have nightmares about it, too.

Sir Ian McKellen writes:

Dear Foot,

Having read your blog, you seem to be obsessed with sex and death.

[lots of fascinating inside information about the theatre snipped]

Dear Sir Ian: by your sentence structure you seem to associate my having read my own blog with my preoccupation with the progenital and terminal events in life's history. Why is this? (You should know better, by the way. And Patrick Stewart's current Macbeth kicks your Lear into touch, frankly.)

Greg Dyke (g.dyke@lesbiansurnames.bbc.uk) emailed me:

Way to go, Foot Eater! Your campaign for proper English is just what we need, and a famous blogger like yourself could be just the person to permeate the national consciousness with his message of hope. Call my agent Pete.

All right: your agent's Pete.

Andrew 'Bowel' Motion, the Poet Laureate, sent me a text message that ran thus:

Parse this sentence if you will, you pretentious arsehole:

Joan is the person I am sitting between the window and.

It ends with a conjunction, yet it is entirely correct, grammatically speaking. Can't pick the bones out of that one, can you, you wanker?

No, I can't, Mr Motion; but there's a subtle distinction between incorrect and merely tedious English which you seem to have blurred in the interests of scoring a linguistic point, and for that I sentence you to a rimjob in hell. You are to give rather than receive: isn't that better?

HE IS RETURNED

2007-12-02T10:04:00.000+09:00

Well, I’m back.

It would take too long to explain why I’ve been away. HM Customs and Excise, Lucky Gregor’s Laundrette in Maidstone, wholly trumped-up charges, golden moles, the RSPCA and a Birmingham prison were all involved, and let’s leave it at that.

Sorry about that last post, by the way. As several people suggested, I wasn’t the author. The benighted soul responsible has been locked in a study with a bottle of whisky and a revolver and is trusted to do the decent thing.

Missed me, have you? I certainly haven’t missed you lot. What an assortment of cranks, oddballs and social lepers you are. I’m glad I never got so hooked on blogging that I felt the need to get up early in the morning to log on, or that I cried for a week once when my internet connection went down. I suppose I oughtn’t to insult you, because I’d like to ask for your help. Do any of you know how to get an electronic tag off an ankle? It was one of the conditions of my early release that I wear one of the bloody things – to tell you the truth I think they just wanted to be rid of me because I never obeyed any of the warders’ orders, but then that was because I didn’t understand their ridiculous Brummie accents ('Coom ere, Foot Ayter, yo payce oov sheet') – but it’s the very devil of a job to stalk people quietly when you’ve got a bit of rattling, beeping machinery fastened round your leg. It might be useful if you were a postman, though – dogs would have difficulty sinking their teeth into your ankle. Come to think of it, it would be handy to have if you were a terrorist trying to board a plane. The security people would be so distracted by the metal around your leg that they’d probably fail to spot the arsenal in your coat pockets. This is a bit of a naff line of humour, is it? I'm trying too hard, am I? Well, in that case, go and read the Anti-Barney's blog or El Barbudo's or somebody's, you f-

I'm sorry, I'm out of sorts: post-traumatic stress and all that. It's just that I CANNOT HANDLE ALL THESE

put the gun down. it's all right. they're only shadows. they're not going to punish you or laugh at you. have some tea

Anyway, what’s been happening out there in the world? I haven’t had time to follow the news because I spent the last couple of weeks of my captivity frantically finishing off my magnum opus, a children’s multicultural adventure book about a teddy bear named Mohammed which I hope will go a long way towards promoting harmony and understanding between the peoples of this earth.

As the great Judge Dredd has been known to say: catch you later, creeps.

I'm not back yet; it's not December

2007-11-04T10:15:00.001+09:00

Has anybody out there a copy of any Morbius comics from the 1970s? Morbius was a reluctant vampire who gorged himself on carotid and jugular blood while feeling guilty about it. There was a terrific 1977 comic in which he starred and which also featured Blade the vampire hunter. Top stuff. I'll pay you good money if you can point me in the direction of this excellent material.

The photo above is a bit naff but it seems even Mr Google can't come up with the 1970s goods these days, and probably wears a gay bunch of garlic around his neck to boot. You don't want to read The Judge's House by Bram Stoker, mister; it will scare your leather vest off. Aaaaaaarrrrgh!!!

R.I.P.

2007-08-08T07:27:00.000+09:00

The Great Mini-Saga Face-Off

2007-08-04T07:41:00.000+09:00

The hidden message in my last post, which none of you halfwits managed to decipher without considerable prompting, was that I'm buggering off for a few months. I did, however, promise to post your Mini-Saga contributions, and so, before I disappear, here they are. Seven fine examples of the art, I'm sure you'll agree; but who wrote them?

I was going to make this a multiple-choice sort of exercise but that would be far too easy. So: there are at least three but no more than seven (obviously) authors represented below. Who are they? And which story is by whom? Answers in a comment or an email, please, and I'll hold you up to adulation or ridicule in due course. Oh, and anyone may take a stab, even if you've contributed yourself and can therefore identify your own authorship with accuracy (well, one would hope so).

Also, don't blame me for the dark tone of these tales. I never said they had to be about domestic violence, assassination, creepy Santas and so on. I reflect reality, I don't influence it.

Stray Cat

Mother watched daughter lovingly though the kitchen window. The girl shuffled along and waited, allowing the tabby to get closer. When the cat paused for too long, the girl offered an invisible treat. They entered the kitchen together and gazed into mother's eyes longingly.

'Mommy,' she said. 'I gots dinner.'

The Sacrifice

He braced himself against an outcrop. Her wrist slipped further from his grasp.

‘Let me go,’ she gasped. ‘Save yourself.’

Imagine her life without me: evenings curled on the settee, tea and tears and indifferent cat for company, my photograph on the mantelpiece...

Eyes brimming compassionately, he released his grip.

God's Wrath

"Armageddon!" he gurgled, on his knees vomiting blood. Green bile streamed from his ears. Ten feet away a young woman exploded sending bits of flesh, bone and gore flying. A small boy doubled over and projected gallons of fecal matter everywhere.

I couldn't believe this. These were my new shoes!

Bad News

She wasn't sure how to put it. David was an old friend but he wasn't acting as a man in his elevated position ought. She'd have to wing it, run on autopilot. Biting her lip she left the cockpit.

How do you tell a flight attendant you think he's straight?

Sweets for the Sweet

'Hurry up and get in here, you miserable old whore,' the mad bastard with no taste buds shouted. 'And bring some of those extra large Tootsie Rolls, too.'

'I’ll be there in just a minute, dear,' she replied, gingerly touching her black eye. 'Just need to scoop the litter box.'

Father Christmas

He rested his bag between tree and chimney, took a cookie, and quietly walked to the boy's room. Finishing the treat, he smiled at the sleeping child. This was a good boy. He would say nothing. The reindeer and deliveries could wait.

He dropped his pants and climbed into bed.

Decision Time

Rodriguez’s head was in the crosshairs. I remembered my briefing. They said he’d massacred civilians. He looked young. Probably had a wife, couple of kids. They couldn’t be wrong, though. Couldn’t have made a mistake. They’d done their homework. Still, what if -

I bit my lip, squeezed the trigger.

Boiling Tom Petty's fans' faces off politely

2007-07-27T09:11:00.001+09:00

Whilst blogging, I have come across Kylie’s body. It is a scientifically demonstrable fact that stones have souls. (In a pig’s eye it is.) Nuclear waste reduces the numbers of hydrofluorocarbons by a third. Conjecture, of course, but well worthwhile; you think I’m drunk, don’t you? The time to appreciate the genius of prog-rock acts like King Crimson has been and gone – it was the late nineties, if you must know. But as the grandfather clock of time swings its pendulum, the wand of reality flickers. If you have managed to keep up thus far, you’re a saint. And probably you’re a weirdo or a geek like me. Yet know this – the Soup Dragon protected his charges in ways God cannot begin to imagine. Life; so be it. If I’m expected to turn tricks on Sunset Boulevard then I’m goddamned tootin’ well going to be paid handsomely for it! And going to submerge myself in the nothingness of being, while I’m at it. It’s to the tower that you’re turning, and I don’t blame you, my chum. Let’s take the entrails out of the beast’s machinery, if you will, and devour them whole. While a motor may singe and an engine might hum, let’s ignore them all in our metal mouths. Don’t break the china, for God’s sake, whatever you do. For from the earth-apple spurts a fountain of Spring, even in these dismal autumnal Summer days. Like blogging, this year’s life blooms and withers at the same time. And for the sake of all our generations’ children – Peace, prithee, and no more nuclear threat. For a while, anyway. So, while the phantasmagoria spills its sexual torrent into the gorge, might we grapple ourselves back over the rim of sanity? I see dead people, said that predictable film. Did you see the twist coming a thousand miles off, as I did? If in, you are one of us; if out, you are not. And the band played on, hellishly. Does Winter hate hidden messages in blog posts as much as you do?

Er... Ciao.

...And another three...

2007-07-22T08:34:00.000+09:00

Deus ex Machina

Phoebe cringed from the fiend. ‘Save me, somebody!’

A huge hand plucked her away.

I chuckled. As The Author I could do what I liked with my characters.

I’d started draft two when I felt the twin pressures at my temples, like the grip of an enormous finger and thumb...

The Mission

Roger swam as if his very life depended on it. His target was a giant egg. Yes, Roger was a spermatozoon.

He thrashed his tail frantically, trying to blot out the terrible reality of what he’d seen: the tonsils a moment ago, and the moustachioed lip on the way in.

Shirley and Derek

They met, made love, married. He drank, she cried, he hit.

She hacked. Then walled him up.

He rotted. Neighbours complained. She disinterred him. He lived (well, sort of). He bit. She turned.

They lurch. They bite. They spread their contagion. In their undead way, they still love one another.

Two more

2007-07-14T08:17:00.001+09:00

Vengeance: Chapter One

‘Your native,’ Carstairs had sighed, gin in hand, at our first meeting after I’d arrived in the country, ‘is basically a barbarian.’

I thought of his words as I stared down at his headless body, thought of my ‘barbarian’ wife, butchered by his sort; and, numb, I went to wash.

Bad Boy

‘Fuck,’ said two-year-old Brian, ‘fuck, fuck, fuck.’

His mother, shocked, sent him to his room and locked the door.

The f pushed one end ever further between his lips but the glottal ck failed to dislodge the bulk of the hairball, and in the morning his mother found Brian choked.

Four dark tales

2007-07-12T01:49:00.000+09:00

I once entered a competition to come up with an original story that was exactly fifty words long, excluding the title*. Sadly, I did not get anywhere, but I reproduce four of my entries below. Try it yourself; it’s fun.

*I've just remembered these 50-word stories are called 'mini-sagas', and were invented by author Brian Aldiss, so credit where it's due.

The Wager

He woke, squinting into the morning sunlight slanting between the blinds, and laughed. A hundred quid was his. One night in this supposedly haunted house and he’d survived unscathed.

He strolled downstairs. As he passed the large mirror in the hall he glanced at his reflection, and began to scream.

Letting Go

Bert was trying to say something, and Enid, weeping silently, leant closer to listen. It sounded as if he were whispering I love you, but it was only the rasping of his tongue across his desiccated lips. No, not his tongue; an insect. She supposed she’d better bury him. Again.

William and the Mushroom

William scrambled down the slope. It was dusk, and normally Mother would be calling him in now for supper. He knelt by the tree and stared at the mushroom, a tiny copy of the enormous mushrooms that had appeared on the horizon last week before everything went ashy and quiet.

The Last Call

This was it, finally. The end. In a few minutes, blissful peace. Suicide: a noble act or the coward’s path? Whatever. It meant nothing to him now.

He lifted the handset and paused. Should he make the call? Yes, said his conscience.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking…’

Day of reckoning

2007-07-10T07:25:00.000+09:00

Back in February last year I presented in lightly fictionalised form what I considered a watertight case supporting the notion that El Barbudo and Kim Ayres were one and the same person. I made the profound mistake of putting it to the popular vote, and lo and behold, you the people got the answer wrong. Once again, democracy proved itself a failed system. Since then I’ve been doing some sleuthing – the details needn’t concern you; suffice it to say there were hidden webcams involved, as well as confidential technologies kindly and unwittingly lent to me by Interpol and the National Security Agency – and I can now reveal the definitive guide to who’s really who on my link list. This time there’s no vote.

Starting with the Emerald Bile: Noreen is really Fat Sparrow. ‘They’re’ ‘both’ wives and mothers with an attitude and ‘they’ ‘both’ swear a lot. Cunningly, they link each other on their sites to try and throw me off the scent. But it didn’t work. Ball Bag, on the other hand, is really Harry Hutton. There’s no evidence, I just know. Dr Maroon is really Gorilla Bananas. Not only does the crafty blighter assume another species as cover, he also employs two very different writing styles: slick and straightforward as Bananas, elliptical and slightly deranged in his Maroon guise. Dr Joseph McCrumble is the third identity of this troubled being and his style sits somewhere in between the other two. Arlington Hynes (Bogol/HA HA HA) is a tough one to finger, I must admit. There’s really nothing like him. However, his collaborator Helen Harridon is clearly Noreen/Fat Sparrow with cleaned-up language, so that would probably make Arlington Ball Bag, aka Harry Hutton. Harry has lavished fulsome praise on Arlington in the past and this is exactly the kind of self-aggrandisement one would expect from a blogger, so, yes, I reckon I’ve got this one right. As always. El Barbudo is Kim Ayres is Jokemail, that’s easy. He’s probably the Anti-Barney too, as he’s gone to ground. And let’s throw in Dr E. Scientist for the same reason (plus he’s got a beard). Which of these five people is real and which are fakes is anybody’s guess. Probably all, or none, or somewhere in between, or vice versa. Philip Challinor’s another slippery customer. I used to think he was Noreen and that he got some sort of perverse thrill out of correcting his own spelling and grammar in the comments, but I now believe he’s far weirder than that. His gravatar is ancient, decrepit and wrinkly… does that suggest anyone to you? Yes? Old Knudsen, perhaps? Brewski and Binty McShae are both Brits who live in the Far East (yes, I know Brewski claims he’s moved) and drink heavily – by their own admission, don’t shoot the messenger - so no difficulty there.

Most of the rest are who they say they are. The ladies generally tell the truth: Lindy, Sam, FMC, Sarah, Boudica, SheBah and Andraste are themselves and no-one else. Kav and Kieran are, natch, one and the same person, and are probably Jagd Kunst too. Hungbunny admits he lives in South London and nobody would do that - the living there or the admitting - even in the guise of someone else, so he’s unique. SafeTinspector and the intolerable Monstee are quite clearly anomalies, brown crusts clinging to the bowl after the filthy swirl that is the sentient being collective has disappeared down that great S-bend in the sky. Ivan the Terrible chickened out of blogging ages ago and shouldn’t even be on the list but I’m too lazy to remove him. Eddie Waring might be Ivan in a new shirt, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Which leaves yours truly, dear reader. No word of a lie – I appear in that sidebar. Can you work out who I am?

Me! Me! Meme!

2007-07-07T07:34:00.000+09:00

Philip Challinor has stung me with one of these things, just like a bee, except Philip hasn't died, I assume. I'm required to come up with eight items of autobiographical trivia. I usually resist doing these things because I can never think of anything amusing to make up, but this time I thought I'd just tell the truth for a change.

1. Being Welsh, I used to ride to school on a sheep.

2. I went to school down a coal mine.

3. I have oculus inversus, a rare condition in which my right eyeball is in the left socket and vice versa.

4. On my tenth birthday my father made me sing an assortment of Nye Bevan's speeches set to the tunes of sixth century Celtic war chants. If the volume of my singing dropped below a certain level he threw legs of mutton at me.

5. I was once bitten by a snake and hospitalised. While my delirium was real, the snake proved to be a rubber replica of the sort that can be purchased in any high street toyshop. The hospital was a model and the doctor who treated me was also false.

6. Since the age of thirty I have had more hair on my palms than on my face.

7. I cannot eat more than two Weetabix at a sitting without vomiting blood.

8. For over a year I have had troubling visions of a life without blogging, a life that is rich, fulfilling and meaningful. These visions are becoming less frequent, thank God.

I gather I now have to 'tag' people, so I'll make it Hungbunny (because there's no way he'll do this), Sam, Philip (nobody said you can't tag people back), Kieran, Garth Marenghi and Eddie Waring.

'Fourth Doctor Arrested As Terror Probe Widens'

2007-07-04T02:23:00.000+09:00

Oh dear, it's looking a bit bad for us. Still, it's often said that unemployment breeds violence.

Dr Maroon has a go at what he calls 'not real' doctors and paints such a crude picture of us that I nearly choked on my roast swan's wing. He even resorts to juvenile name-calling, labelling us a 'shower of shite', the Nessie-bothering knob jockey.

I suppose we'll all now have to undergo re-interviews for our jobs, carefully designed to assess us for suicidal terrorist tendencies, just as we currently have to give an assurance that we're not new versions of Harold Shipman.

Mind you, some of us do behave badly. I once had a colleague who admitted to me that he'd had sex with one of his patients. I'd have reassured him that this wasn't such a bad thing if he hadn't been a forensic pathologist.

Update!

Read this, Maroon. You'll love it.

I grovel at your altar

2007-07-01T10:15:00.000+09:00

While I'm supping, I might as well celebrate the departure of Patricia Hewitt, and welcome as my new boss Alan Johnson, who is an ex-postman and in his most recent post as Education Secretary came up with 'new ideas and proposals', one of which is 'parents spending more time with their children in a bid to help them progress with their literacy and numeracy skills.' Quite the policy genius, then, and one admirably equipped to lead our fair nation out of the morass its citizens have got it in over the last ten years.

A shit joke with which to return

2007-07-01T09:23:00.000+09:00

It's 1969, and there's a groovy party happening in the Hollywood hills. Everyone who's anyone in the world of showbiz is there, Daddy-O. The Byrds are snorting coke with Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan is having sex with the Velvet Underground, and Andy Warhol is spiking up with Sandy Shaw and Twiggy.

Janis Joplin appears in a swirl of ganja smoke and starts giving Jim Morrison head, before moving on to the the rest of his band. Then she goes down on John Lennon and satisfies him orally, repeating the performance with Jimi Hendrix, David Frost and Marlon Brando.

Whereupon Michael Caine stalks over and yells at Janis: 'Oi! You're only supposed to blow the bloody Doors off!'

Seasonal misery

2007-06-16T19:22:00.000+09:00

The sun's out and bathing the lawn in gold, the bees are bumbling and the butterflies flitting, and holidays beckon. What better time to wallow in the cesspit of bitterness?

Here are some things that are causing me more annoyance than a hypothetical recrudescence of Herpes simplex.

Harry Potter. Will the world just get over him, for Christ's sake? It's only a series of children's books. Who gives a rat's arse if Magwitch dies in the end, or whatever? Note to grown men and women who openly read these books in public: you look like big babies. Especially when your lips move and you have to follow the text with your finger. May Harry catch crotch-rot off what's-her-name.

Asparagus. Not content with possessing a bitter, repugnant taste like those root vegetables your mother always forced you to eat, these bastard sticks make your urine stink so that even a few drops give the whole house the character of an 18th century Parisian pissoir. They're often served up as the main course, with a bit of garnish on the side. A handful of vegetables as the main course? I don't think so.

Gordon Brown. So he's going to be the next Prime Minister. Yes? And then what? Judging by the way this whole thing has been drawn out, the man is clearly a monstrous ego with legs and a false eye. Watch taxes on everything that's fun in life rocket into outer space.

Rose wine. Oh my God, I'm so happening because I like this strawberry-flavoured water all of a sudden. It's not at all because I've read that it's fashionable, I just... kinda have a taste for it, y'know? Bollocks. (Yes, I know there's supposed to be an accent on the 'e', I just haven't worked out how to do this.)

Music. I've started to realise that music is a colossal waste of time. I bought one of those iPod things two years ago and loaded it up, but do I listen to it? Ever? Do I f. Sometimes I look at my quite extensive CD collection and think, God, what I could have done with all that money instead.

Adolf Hitler and Joe Stalin. There are new books out about these two. How original. Please, just stop.

Psychotherapists. I met a psychotherapist acquaintance the other day and asked how he was. 'What do you mean?' he replied.

Foot Eater. He's become a real irritant to me, especially when I reread his blog. In fact, he makes me want to chew my own face off.

Alcohol. It doesn't work that well any more, have you noticed? I find I have to consume more and more to get the desired effect.

Serial killers. The golden years were the fifties to the eighties. We had Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, the Boston Strangler, Son of Sam, the Yorkshire Ripper, Jeffrey Dahmer and others. The nineties gave us Fred West and Harold Shipman, which wasn't bad. But lately? Not a peep. Come on, chaps, pull your fingers out.

SHOUT WITH ME

2007-05-25T06:02:00.000+09:00

Does anyone feel like joining in?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGHHHH!

It's a great film, The Shout (1978), by the way, with John Hurt, Alan Bates and Tim Curry. I've just watched it for the whateverth time and I heartily recommend it. Be sure to shout along to it!

Attack of the GROLIES

2007-05-19T02:11:00.000+09:00

The Accident & Emergency Department, Shipmanville General, four in the morning. My shift was finishing at nine, and as I’d been on my feet from when I’d started at nine in the evening until about an hour ago, you’d have thought patients would have the good grace to stop coming in or at least to wait till morning. No such luck. Sister Griselda, let’s call her, poked her head round the door of the mess, a rictus of glee on her grotesque features. (Actually, she wasn’t bad looking, but this is my story and the hell with ‘facts’, damn your eyes.)

‘You’re going to love this one,’ she cackled.

I considered having a tantrum but I’d already breached my quota for that week, so I tossed my polystyrene cup at the bin, forgetting it was still half full, so that the wall above the bin was left looking like a cell wall after a dirty protest, and followed her. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘A PFO? A PDE? A FUBARBUNDY?’ Those are, respectively, Pissed and Fell Over; Pissed, Denies Everything; and Fucked Up Beyond All Repair But Unfortunately Not Dead Yet. At that hour of the night little else tends to come in.

‘None of the above,’ Griselda grinned. ‘It’s a GROLIES.’

Oh Christ, that was bad. A Guardian Reader Of Limited Intelligence in Ethnic Sandals. I didn’t think I could handle it and began to weep like a baby but Griselda took a firm grip on my arm and propelled me into the cubicle, backing off and drawing the curtain like the backstabbing coward she was. Witch. The GROLIES was sitting up in bed and the first thing, the first thing she did was look at her watch. I’d probably breached some item of human rights legislation by keeping her waiting five minutes. I saw from her notes that she was 30 but she looked ten years older, which probably had something to do with the pigeon’s nest she had on her head instead of a hair style and the lines slashed into her face, the stigmata of the chronically aggrieved. An older man in his fifties sat by her bed, looking weary. Sure enough, folded beside her was a copy of The Guardian.

‘Hello, I’m Dr Eater,’ I said brightly. ‘What can I do for you?’

The GROLIES doubled over in pain and dribbled saliva into a kidney dish. After a time she sat up and said, ‘I need an X-ray.’

‘Please tell me where the pain is,’ I suggested.

‘It’s my appendix,’ she said.

‘Whereabouts exactly is the pain?’

‘In my abdomen where the appendix are [sic].’

‘When did it start?’

‘Look, I’m in pain, will you just send me for a fucking X-ray?’

I persuaded her to let me examine her abdomen, and asked if she would prefer her father to step outside. She stared at me in wonder.

‘He’s not my father, he’s my partner.’

I glanced at the man who nodded, eyebrows raised, as if to say What can you do?

‘He’s a lawyer, you know,’ she added.

Back and forth we went, I trying to go through the time-honoured process of taking a history, performing an examination and making a diagnosis, she demanding that I stop wasting her time and send her for the X-ray to which she was apparently entitled according to some Act of Parliament or other. I got the I know what’s wrong with my body better than you do spiel, and the you’re paid with my taxes so I get to call the shots lecture. Finally I’d gleaned enough to pronounce on what was wrong.

‘It’s period pain’.

No, no, it wasn’t. I listened while I was blamed for never having experienced menstrual cramps myself and therefore having no idea of what they felt like; then I endured a diatribe about my crass incompetence and impending removal from the medical register. So I did what any strong-willed, principled professional should.

I gave in.

I ordered an X-ray, an abdominal ultrasound, a slew of blood tests and urine analysis. They all came back negative, and the patient stormed out with a fistful of painkillers, most put out that she wasn’t iller than she was, and with no harm having been done apart from several hundred pounds’ worth of wasted taxpayers’ money.

I sound like a callous bastard with this story, and just the sort of arrogant, couldn’t-give-a-damn physician that you may have had the misfortune to come across yourself. I’m not normally like this. Please understand that these were special circumstances. The patient was a GROLIES. The GROLIES are everywhere, and they’re the offspring of an illicit and unholy congress between government and media. They’re characterised by ignorance, querulousness and self-righteousness in equal measure. They have right-wing counterparts in the as yet un-acronymed types who come to hospital clutching the Daily Mail. They’re what soon-to-be-ex-Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt would be if she were a patient. They’re enough sometimes to make me consider going to my employers and telling them where to stick their job, except then the next day the Halifax would be telling me where to stick my mortgage application, the gas company would be telling me where to stick my bouncing cheques, and Harry ‘Mashed Potato’ Reeves, the local debt collector, would be telling me where to stick my excuses. And probably showing me, too.

Lovely fags

2007-05-16T05:37:00.000+09:00

I started smoking in 1988 when I started university. It was South Africa and the little bastards cost in real terms 45 pence for a pack of 30. What was I supposed to do, for God's sake?

Between 1988 and 1993 I'd smoke anything. If it was tubular and went between my lips, I'd set fire to it. (Just as well I wasn't gay, eh? Ah ha ha haaaa!) Mostly it was legit cigarettes or cigars, pre-packaged ones or roll-ups. Sometimes - depending on if I was trying to get it on with some high-class earnest type of girl - it was revolting herbal stuff. More often it was that other stuff what you get in them Amsterdam coffee shops. Crack wasn't big in South Africa then, so I never ventured down that alley, and my brain thanks me for that even today.

I quit the nicotinic bastards in 1997 and apart from the odd relapse over the next two years have been celibate ever since. It's the best thing I ever did: my skin is smoother, my lungs are more elastic, my arteries are less clogged with sludge, my hair stinks less, I'll probably live at least three years longer, etc., etc., etc., blah, blah, blah.

But I still crave the little creatures.

Yum yum. You buy Winstons in a crinkly red and white pack, like the American packages, not like the hard cardboard packs you get over here in Europe. You're lying on an acid-white beach in Cape Town on an early December day, six weeks of sensuous Christmas summer holidays ranging ahead of you like a highway. Above you, the sky is a bleached bowl of pure blue. At your elbow is a six-pack of Castle lager. In your hand is the paperback you've been wanting to read for months.

You fire up. The flame rustles around the paper and then catches the leaves. They crackle at an accelerating rate as you suck the first drag deep into your throat. You're not looking to burn your trachea - that can be fun, but you want Camels or Marlboros for that - but something as soft as Silk Cut won't do.

Then the nurse comes and tells you there's a new non-smoking policy in this hospital trust and you start arguing and before you know it there's been a fight and you've been given an injection but at least you got a sly fag in, ha ha haaaaaaaaaa...

What are your favourite smoking stories?

Because that's the kind of person I am

2007-05-12T02:57:00.000+09:00

This is a shot of Donald Sutherland as he appears in the final seconds of the 1978 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a superior remake of the 1950s Red paranoia sci-fi classic. With this picture I have spoiled the ending of the film for you, if you haven’t seen it yet but had intended to. I hereby reveal a new art form, that of ruining a surprise twist or ending in a film with the use of a single still. One must choose one’s cinematic subjects carefully as by no means all twists are susceptible to this. The revelations in Seven and The Usual Suspects, for example, cannot be communicated using this technique.

Be sure to visit here over the coming weeks when I shall be spoiling your enjoyment of The Wicker Man, Don’t Look Now and The Crying Game, among many others.

Mailbollocks

2007-05-05T22:23:00.000+09:00

I return to the internet from a much-needed break in reality to find my mailbox bulging. What's wrong with you people? Don't you have lives?

Here's a sample of the drivel I've felt compelled to plough through for the sake of politeness.

thickasasnail@witless.com writes:

Dear Foot Eater

Where have you been?

Didn't you bother reading my post of 20 December 2006?

Genghis Khan's Fridge (don't you just love wacky, 'surreal' names, they're sooo original) writes:

Dear Foot Eater

Your a guy who nose how to pull the hot chicks. can you give me some advise about how to pull hot chicks cos i dont get any dates?

Sorry, Mr Fridge, I'm afraid I can't help you there. I gave up dating because I was fed up with having to get the Mace out of my eyes every time.

**n** Mc**** writes:

Dear Footsie

Although I come across on my blog as all liberal and PC and that, I have a recurring fantasy of you dressed in the uniform of the captain of an SS Panzer division. Might you consider dressing up like this and sending me a photo? Ta mate.

Do you take me Fuhrer pervert? (I crack myself up sometimes, I really do.)

O*d Knu*se* writes:

Ye bastard. Ye're nothing but a Sassenach bastard, ye bastard, ye. Ye bastard.

Not quite sure what your point is, Mr K, but thanks anyway, and I hope the stitches come out soon.

fudgetunnel@uphillgardeners.co.uk writes:

Dear Feater

You're obviously a man of impeccable taste and profound wisdom. What should I stick on my iPod for my forthcoming trip to New York City?

Fudge, I'd recommend Blondie, Lou Reed, Television, Talking Heads, Ramones and the New York Dolls.

Mr Charles Strange writes:

Dear Mr Eater

You are quite clearly extremely well read and highly literate. I wonder if you'd care to comment on a matter that has been vexing my friends and me for some time now. In The Guermantes Way, the third volume of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, the behaviour of the narrator appears to foreshadow that of another later modernist protagonist. I believe that this person is Joyce's Leopold Bloom but my friends insist it is Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Your thoughts?

Sorry, Mr Strange, I didn't follow any of that. Are there tits in this book of yours?

bonedomedchav@neander.co.uk writes:

yeh foot eater you tell im! whose he fink he is wiv all his ponsing about. yer a man of the peopel just like us. only fing is, why dont you sware as much as you used, i liked that, it was well wiked.

Remove your foetid presence from my consciousness at once, you revolting plebeian.

The greatest film ever made

2007-04-14T10:06:00.000+09:00

The second best film ever made

2007-04-14T09:59:00.000+09:00

No! It can't be!

2007-04-14T07:31:00.000+09:00

AAAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!

It really IS as bad as some say!

I'm going to be sick. Then I'm going to take this film apart, limb by limb.

Martin Scorsese, you're a prostitute.

Jolly hockey sticks and a bottle of rum!

2007-04-14T04:24:00.000+09:00

It's Friday night, the weather outlook for the weekend in this part of the Empire is glorious, and I'm feeling rather chipper. So I thought I'd do one of those cheery blog posts; you know, the type where one tips the wink to fellow webloggers and points out amusing and/or interesting things they've been up to this week and all that. Pour yourself a drinkie (I nearly said another drinkie, but I know you're not that naughty!), change that Vaughan Williams compact disc to something a bit more racy like the Beatles, and enjoy!

First up: Dr Maroon seems to have been peering a little too deeply into his cup of mead this week! His latest post makes even less sense than usual. The poor fellow's deluding himself that he's actually met another blogger, and that the two of them re-enacted the Yalta conference! Careful there, Jock, och aye the noo. Oops, bit politically un-PC, there, Foot...!

Next: Philip Challinor has just published his first novel! Beelzebub, it's called. Sounds a bit daring, doesn't it! Philip's a sound sort of chap and one you'd trust to open the batting against India, so I dare say his tale is something you could safely order for Aunt Flo for a birthday prezzie.

FatMammyCat is in thoughtful mood and reflecting on the state of the world. She's reading something about terrorism and the nature of evil. Steady on, old thing! I mean, there's a time and a place for seriousness, but it isn't as if the clergy has been completely extinguished, and they are paid a decent stipend to work out these sorts of problems for us, aren't they? That said, I'm all for ladies' power and their right to express opinions and that.

Mr Old Knudsen has some fairly fruity images for us on Friday the 13th. The delightfully goatish old rogue is clearly trying to shock, though those of us who have been through Harrow remain unmoved, having seen what we've seen back in the day! Eh? Lads? (Are there any 'smileys' to be had showing an index finger laid against a nose beneath a winking eye? If so, be a sport and pop 'em in the old email.)

Sorry if I've missed you out. It's just that Henrietta's braying from the bedroom and one doesn't want to keep one's filly waiting unridden for too long, does one? Bottoms up, I think (both with and without an apostrophe!)!

Cheerio!

This is one of the stupidest bastard ideas I've ever had for a post. It will never happen again. I swear it on my grandmother's grave. FE.

Therapy Blues (part two of two)

2007-04-13T02:05:00.000+09:00

‘Memory,’ warbled the speakers, ‘all alone in the moonlight.’

Georgie poured tea and beamed. ‘Nothing beats Miss Streisand for mood music.’

Zeke was supine on an antique leather couch in the living room. For some reason they’d covered it in a tarpaulin before inviting him to lie down. Night had fallen and the room was lit with a few dim bulbs almost masked by chintzy orange and brown shades. Two heavy oak chairs, also antiques by the look of them, were positioned at the foot of the couch, facing him. Rudy had brought in a tea tray and sat beside Georgie in one of the oak chairs.

Something fucking freaky was happening to Zeke. He’d gradually begun to regain control over his limbs, but instead of gathering his strength to strangle the two weirdos and get the hell out of there, he’d felt… held back. It just seemed wrong, somehow, the notion of killing them. He’d let Georgie lead him by the hand into the living room and had lain down on the couch when she’d patted it. It was quite comfortable here, with the aroma of the tea and the soft music in the background and Georgie and Rudy sitting smiling at him.

‘Now, Ezekiel,’ said Georgie. ‘By the way, you don’t mind if we call you that, do you?’

They must have looked at his driving licence. Yes, he thought, I do fucking mind. Hearing his full name brought back instant images of his father holding his head down the outhouse toilet pan and screaming at him for getting his scripture recital wrong. Old god damn bastard pissed his pants when Zeke gave him his fiftieth birthday present: an axe in the head. Thinking back now, he’d maybe been a little harsh. ‘No, I don’t mind,’ he said, surprising himself.

‘Good. Now, Ezekiel, the first step in the healing process is to admit what you’ve done. Before you can move forward you have to let out all that guilt. Secrets are like pus in a blister of denial. Prick that blister, Ezekiel. Prick it. We’ll deal with what’s inside.’

Christ, they were asking him to confess? And then he thought: why not? Why the hell not? It was getting so hard, so damn tiring to cover his tracks again every few weeks. How much easier would it be just to open up. He gazed beyond his feet at Georgie and Rudy, who grinned encouragement.

‘My name is Ezekiel Stone, and I’m a murderer.’

‘That’s good, Ezekiel,’ said Georgie. ‘That’s really good.’

‘I’ve killed four in Connecticut, two in upstate New York, seven in Pennsylvania and four here in Nebraska.’ He was unable to stop himself. It felt good. ‘Oh, and a couple of pigs in North Dakota.’ Georgie and Rudy were leaning forward in their chairs, still smiling, their breath coming a little quicker. The light twinkled off Georgie’s earrings and Rudy’s glasses and hair lacquer.

‘When was the last time you killed, Ezekiel?’ Rudy this time.

‘This morning.’ He pictured the good-looking girl he’d shot in the store. ‘Poor bitch.’

The therapists let out a sigh together and managed to glance at each other without actually doing so.

‘Excellent, Ezekiel,’ breathed Georgie. ‘Doesn’t that feel better?’

He had to admit that it did. Suddenly a feeling of love for this couple bathed his body like warmed milk. He sipped some tea.

‘Now,’ she went on, ‘it’s time for the next step. One can’t separate the psychological from the physical aspects of healing.’

Rudy got up and disappeared for a minute. When he came back he was dragging the refuse sack Zeke had seen earlier. The smell was there again, but it didn’t bother Zeke so much. Rudy placed the sack at the foot of the couch and went out again, returning with a large iron bucket filled with steaming water. Zeke watched with interest as Rudy reached into the sack and pulled out a mess of feathers stuck together with red glue. There was a head and beak attached, and it took Zeke a moment to realise that it was a dead crow, one that had been run over by the look of it. Rudy handed it to Georgie who dipped it in the bucket of hot water and began to massage it flat between her chunky hands. She grinned at Zeke.

‘Take off your clothes, honey.’

He did so and lay down again expectantly. She knelt by the side of the couch and spread the flattened bird over his chest, smoothing it down. Over her shoulder Zeke could see Rudy reach into the sack, withdraw a rodent with a tyre-track across its middle, and dip it into the water. Georgie caught his enquiring look.

‘It’s a poultice. Rudy and I find it very useful in the healing process. It’s important to reconnect in a genuinely physical way with the wrongs you’ve committed.’

It made sense to Zeke. Hold on; no, it didn’t. ‘But I’m a mass murderer,’ he said. ‘I’ve killed nearly twenty people -’

‘People?’ she laughed. ‘Oh, honey! This is rural America. Every second person’s a mass murderer or serial killer or something. If all of them had therapy there’d be no time nor room to do anything else. No, the reason you need healin’ is ‘cause you killed our Shirl.’

And Rudy lifted from the sack the head and powerful neck of the mastiff Zeke had hit. Its eyes had been removed. Rudy propped it on a small table at the foot of the couch and produced a small paring knife. Making an incision at the base of the dog’s skull at the back, he began expertly to skin the cranium.

Zeke lay back, content, watching them in turn: Georgie as she flattened and spread the roadkill over his torso and limbs, working the edges of the creatures up against each other with her fingers so that the poultice formed a growing whole, Rudy as he peeled the scalp and face and muzzle of the mastiff away in one piece from the underlying bones .

Hours passed, or perhaps minutes. The animal poultice now covered Zeke’s body entirely, forming a high collar at the neck. Georgie helped him sit up as, beaming radiantly, Rudy approached him and with exquisite care lowered the dog mask over his head and pressed it into place against his face and neck, making sure his eyes were aligned with the holes.

Georgie clapped her hands in delight. ‘You might want to pout a little to make that snout protrude,’ Rudy remarked.

Georgie fetched a mirror and held it up in front of Zeke. ‘We done healed you good, Ezekiel,’ she squealed.

Zeke stared into the glass and his mind snapped.

He never knew quite how he made it to the road – there had been screaming (his own), and shattering glass and the suffocating heat of the summer night and the awful hairy cloying of loose lips flapping in his mouth – but he scrambled to his feet and stood on the white line in the centre as the headlights bore down and although the driver trod on the brakes it was too late and Zeke realised he’d been hit only when he found himself staring at the taillights of the car. Then, nothing.

*

Cobb’s Bar n’ Grill nestles in a dip just off Creek Row, and mostly it’s locals who go there, seeing how it’s somewhat off the beaten track, though a fair few travellers stop by after they’ve taken a wrong turn on the prairie roads. As well as the finest sirloin in Nebraska, Cobb’s has got pool tables, Bud on tap, and, best-loved of all, its own house band, The Lost Boys. The 'Boys are a funny-looking bunch and folks often get put off when they first see them. I been a regular at Cobb’s for years now and I admit that I still find their get-up mighty weird: all those feathers and beaks and that fur. But my Lord, when you hear them play! The music is just the sweetest thing you ever heard, like honey from a rock, and you feel cleansed and healed after an evening listening to it (though it’s hard just to listen when the tunes are so damn catchy, and many’s the couple you’ll find taking to the dance floor on a Friday night). Then again, Cobb’s’s owners, Georgie and Rudy, are in the healing business themselves, so it’s no surprise their band follows suit.

The 'Boys got themselves a new fiddle player a couple months ago, and although he doesn’t say anything, he‘s a hit. Poor fellow’s got no legs, so he has to sit in this wicker chair; but he plays that fiddle so fast and so hard he damn near sets fire to it. He’s got the oddest face of them all, and in a crazy way looks like Georgie and Rudy’s old mastiff Shirl, God rest her soul. Last night he did something real funny. The band were winding down but were persuaded to do one last encore, so they gave us a kick-ass new song of theirs called Dog Gone Blues. It ended on a fiddle solo, and all through it the new boy threw back his head and just howled.

The End

Therapy Blues (part one of two)

2007-03-30T01:35:00.000+09:00

Zeke blew out of town at dawn in a hotwired ’73 Ford Fairlane which some kid must have spent a small fortune restoring. Tough shit. Zeke had bigger problems. The sun was rising so quickly that the shadows of the town’s few tall buildings seemed to be shrinking back from the side of the road to avoid the car. Zeke kept up a steady 40 – no point in attracting attention – until he was clear of the suburbs and on the open road. Two lanes disappeared into the horizon ahead and on either side was parched prairie scrub. He turned the radio on, fired up a Lucky Strike and put his foot down.

It had been an accident. If the guy had just emptied the cash register he would have gotten out of there and nobody’d have been hurt. Instead the asshole had played at superheroes, no doubt to impress the three other customers in the store, and had gone for a piece he kept under the counter. Some Captain America he’d made after that, sprawled splay-legged on the floor with the contents of his head sprayed across the back wall. Zeke had had to take out the three customers, too, of course, one of them a girl who was quite a looker. He’d hauled the bodies into a back room and covered the mess in the front with some newspapers but it wasn’t going to buy him much time. He’d stowed the gun in the waistband of his jeans and loped through the silent streets till he’d spotted the Ford in a side road.

The early heat uncoiled itself across the prairie like a sidewinder. There’d been a couple of hundred dollars in the cash register and after an hour Zeke stopped at a gas station, filled the tank, and bought cigarettes, a bottle of Wild Turkey, a package of Slim Jims and a road map of Nebraska. He drove with the map open across the steering wheel and tried to figure a way out of this god damn hick state he should never have wandered into. New Mexico was where he needed to be, was where he could ditch the car and the gun and lie low for a few weeks, safe.

Nine o’clock, and the road ahead was shimmering and he was starting to stink of sweat. There was nothing on the radio but hayseed country stations. God damn shitkickers: did they really have nothing more in life to worry about than their ‘baybee leavin’ theyum’? Zeke thought that maybe he should take a shot at writing a country lyric. Hey Mister, I done gone done wrong/My heart’s real torn and sore/But not as torn as those shot-up stiffs/In the backroom of that store. He laughed and took a hit off the whiskey bottle.

Two hours he’d been driving, and he’d seen maybe ten other cars. And all around, the fucking scrubland. Where were all the cornfields the Midwest was supposed to be famous for, feeding the nation? God damn Okie farmers were probably laughing their fat asses off while the government subsidies kept pouring in, courtesy of hardworking taxpayers like Zeke. The heat was a shroud now, plastering his hair to his scalp and cloying in his mouth and nostrils. The radio station turned to static and he fumbled at the dial till he got a faint signal. More country, but a song he liked for a change: Bukkake Blues by The Snot Soup Singers.

The dog ambled into the middle of the road and stopped and Zeke hit the brakes in a drawn-out yowling of fraying rubber because it wasn’t just any dog, it was a great bastard the size of a pony, some sort of mastiff, and the Ford fishtailed and he struggled to hold it but the momentum carried the back of the car slewing round and the dumb bastard dog was just standing there staring at him and he saw it growing bigger and then he hit it and it was like slamming against a rock wall and something bounced off his head and he was out.

*

The sponge was cool and damp against his forehead like a mother’s kiss.

‘Ready to eat something now?’

The woman was maybe forty, her huge bulk squeezed into a tiny pair of lime polyester pants so that the rest of her spilled over the waistband like a mushroom’s cap. She wore a denim jacket over an orange T-shirt with a picture of Barbra Streisand on it. Her face was perfectly circular and beaming, and when she laughed her earrings jangled like overloaded key chains. Her hair was mouse-brown and tumbled over her round shoulders in unkempt tangles.

Zeke sat up. He was on a bed in a small, dim room which smelt of wet fur. He’d been awake now for a while, and had learned from the woman – whose name was Georgie – that he had been unconscious for ten hours. Georgie and her husband, whom Zeke hadn’t met yet, had pulled Zeke from the wreckage of the car and taken him to their house which was fifty yards down the road. They both knew first aid and had checked him over, and he didn’t seem to have anything broken. Zeke felt sick and his head ached like hell, but otherwise he was fine.

A tall, incredibly skinny man came in carrying a tray. His pitch-black hair was lacquered down and had a razor-sharp parting on the side, and he wore thick horn-rimmed glasses and a fixed, senseless grin. He looked like an older version of the kind of kid Zeke used to slap around in school.

‘Hi there. I’m Rudy,’ he said. ‘You must be hungry.’

Despite his nausea Zeke discovered he had an appetite, and he attacked the big plate of beef stew and was mopping up the gravy with a hunk of bread when he realised that the gun was gone from the waistband of his jeans.

As if reading his thoughts, Georgie said, ‘Your gun’s safe, honey, and we got your wallet and other stuff too.’

Zeke helped himself to apple pie. He needed to take a look at the car but from what this fucking rube couple had said it was a write off, which meant he had to find another set of wheels. Earlier he’d looked out the window and seen a pickup truck parked in the driveway. The two of them would be fairly easy to deal with, especially if he could get hold of the gun.

‘Lucky for you,’ Georgie said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘That we’re therapists. Both of us.’

What the hell? ‘Sorry, I don’t understand,’ said Zeke. He stood up. ‘Look, you’ve been very kind, but I should get going. If I can just have my -’

His legs buckled and he dropped back on to the bed. His arms flailed like empty sleeves. Something in the god damn food.

‘Oh no,’ said Georgie, giving him the warmest smile he’d ever seen. ‘You can’t go yet. Like I said, we’re therapists. And you need therapy, don’t you, honey? You’ve done something very wrong.’

Ah, Christ, he must have said something while he was unconscious, or there’d been news bulletins or something. He didn’t feel sleepy at all, just couldn’t control his limbs. The husband, Rudy, had disappeared and now he came back hauling a large, bulging refuse sack, his grin so broad that it threatened to split his face in half.

Zeke smelled something in the air and began to be afraid.

Contractual obligation post

2007-03-18T11:08:00.000+09:00

Buy this book from here when you can. Last time I checked it was impossible to order it. Its compiler says it’s quite good. Harry Hutton has an entry in it, so you might get up to two minutes' worth of fun for your tenner. There's some kind of charity thing involved as well; burns victims or crack babies or some such.

As I say, though, it's impossible to order the thing.

I am not Steve Buscemi

2007-03-16T09:30:00.000+09:00

So many people have been emailing, writing and even phoning me (at four in the morning - thanks, you loser stalker freak, whoever you were/are) about this issue that I feel obliged to set the record straight. (Somebody telexed me, and I don’t even know what that is.)

I am not Steve Buscemi.

I don’t know quite how the idea that I was him managed to take hold amidst the collection of social inadequates, weirdos and douchebags that haunts the nether reaches of the internet. You, dear reader, in other words. I have never obscured my identity. I’m an Englishman in his thirties who is variously a morgue attendant, a doctor, and a vigilante fighting against the creeping peril of the undead when they raise their rotting collective head to disturb the suburban peace. Nowhere in that potted CV do I find anything to support the notion that I’m an Italian-American actor born in Brooklyn in 1957 who has appeared in some of the coolest, most iconic films and television series of the last fifteen years and has usually been killed off during these films and television series in interesting ways (more about this in a later post). I mean, I am pretty cool, but I’m that way not because I’m a Hollywood movie star but rather through a combination of good genes, tremendous and sustained effort in the gym, rigorous dietary self-discipline, and innate talent, as well as excellent and expensive skin- and hair-care products. Plus, my tailor is old school: East End Jewish, the third generation inheritor of the family business, and in total control of his shit. A modern-day alchemist, he turns his shit into gold, silken gold in a blue-black navy wool blend with the most imperceptible pinstripe weave. The other day he was fitting the jacket of my new suit over my shoulders as I stood before his full-length mirror with my torso bathed in a pink and white Aquascutum slim-fit shirt which had set me back two Cs and was worth every penny. It was as though I was slipping into an orgasm induced by the velvet friction against my chest and thighs of cloth hand-woven from natural fibres. As I stroked my off-mauve Daniel Hechter tie into a casually perfect half-Windsor knot, I reflected that Steve Buscemi, my demi-hemi-semi-namesake and the man all those rancid bloggers thought I was, would have at best gone for something tacky like Versace or, Madonn’ forbid, Gucci.

So no, I’m not Steve Buscemi.

And if any of you motherfucking cocksuckers says so again, I’ll find you, clip you, whack you and then kill you.

With respect.

Stiff things

2007-03-13T04:36:00.000+09:00

A woman in India has married a corpse. For some perverse reason this reminded me of my second year as a medical student when we spent a year dissecting a human cadaver. There were four of us to a body. The cadavers were preserved using a formalin-like substance, which smelled like the vapours from a freshly-opened grave and which filled the spongiform tissues in the body, causing them to expand. This meant that all the male cadavers sported prodigious erections. Gravity, however, took its inevitable toll and so the members in question were bent sideways.

One of my fellow students was a naïve young lady whose identity it would be caddish to reveal, so let’s call her Margaret Shuttleton of 27 Groveland Drive. ‘Gosh,’ said Margaret as the four of us stood gazing down at our newly unshrouded cadaver at the beginning of the year (1988).

‘Yes,’ I nodded, impressed at the size of the thing.

‘It must be really difficult,’ she murmured, spellbound.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘You know… having sex,’ she frowned. ‘With it bending to the side like that.’

‘You mean you thought…’ I said.

Which in turn reminds me of the following joke.

Professor of anatomy to pretty female first-year medical student: ‘What part of the human body expands to ten times its original size under an emotional impact?’

Pretty female medical student (blushing): ‘I’d rather not answer that.’

Smart-alec male medical student: ‘The pupil of the eye, Prof.’

Professor to pretty female medical student: ‘Not only are you ignorant, you’re also going to be very disappointed one day.’

The turnip

2007-03-01T03:29:00.000+09:00

27 February 2007

Dear Mr Eater

With reference to your letter dated 20 February 2007: Vegetables of any appearance which are grown within the bounds of a private residence and are not causing a nuisance to people other than the resident/s him/her/themselves/self, fall outside the remit of Brentwood District Council. I regret that we cannot assist you in this matter.

Yours sincerely

D.V.S. Fox, Liaison Officer, Brentwood District Council.

11 March 2007

Dear Mr Eater

Thank you for your recent letter which we read with great interest. It certainly sounds like a peculiar turnip you have there, and I suspect I too would be alarmed if I saw one that resembled the well-known politician you refer to! Unfortunately this is not quite the sort of thing we’re looking for on Gardeners’ Question Time. The programme offers gardeners the opportunity to seek advice from our panel of experts about problems encountered in the growing of vegetables and other plants, and the fact that your turnip frightens you is not something the panel would be able to help with.

With all best wishes,

Doug Hole, Director of Lifestyle Programming, BBC Radio Four.

PS If you can see the turnip then presumably you’ve pulled it out of the ground, in which case, how can it still be growing every day as you claim?

22 March 2007

Dear Mr F Eater

Further to our telephone conversation of Wednesday 21 March, I am writing to confirm that I have asked you to desist from calling our station about the turnip in your garden. I confirm that I reassured you that you were in no danger from the turnip, and that I pointed out to you that your repeated telephone calls were amounting to harrassment and wasting police time. You agreed that you would desist on the understanding that further such activity would lead to prosecution.

Yours sincerely

Detective Constable Meredith Stoneheart.

23 March 2007

Dear Mr E Foot, You wrote us asking about your turnip. There are of course many instance’s in history of vegetable’s resembling human being’s, and I suspect that your turnips resemblance to Health Secretary Mrs Patricia Hewitt is entirely coincidental. I am sorry to say our Union has neither the time nor the capacity to come and inspect the turnip, nor to remove it neither. Furthermore, might I add that I find your language and indeed your very rationale for writing to us grossly offensive. We are not ‘swede-bashers’, as you so crudely stereotype us, and the fact that we are based in East Anglia does not in itself make us expert’s on tuberous vegetable’s.

Your’s,

Rupert Ruction, PIGFUCERS (President, Integrated General Farmers Union, Central/Eastern Regions, Suffolk).

31 March 2007

Dear Mr/Mrs/Ms Foot Eater

The Prime Minister has read your letter with interest and is grateful for your contribution to the national dialogue. He regrets that he is unable to enter into personal correspondence on this matter at the present time.

Yours sincerely

R. Slicker, House of Commons, London SW1.

13 April 2007

Dear Foot

Just a quick note to ask how you are. I tried phoning but you weren’t in, and you didn’t answer the door when I knocked. I’m a little concerned that you didn’t collect your prescription this week. Please call me on my mobile just to let me know you’re okay.

Best wishes

Sam Hain, Community Psychiatric Nurse.

18 April 2007

Excerpt from pathologist’s report, Brentwood General Hospital.

Subject is a 36-year-old male, height 1.8 metres, weight 80 kilogrammes, no distinguishing marks. Post mortem examination reveals extensive blunt trauma to abdomen, chest and skull resulting in ruptured spleen, multiple rib fractures with bilateral pneumothoraces, and fractures to cranial vault. These injuries are consistent with crushing by a large object, as yet unidentified. Police Scene of Crime report indicates carpet of house where subject’s body found was smeared extensively with garden soil. The substance beneath subject’s fingernails is identified as Brassica rapa rapa, commonly known as the turnip.

The worst and the best jokes I've ever heard

2007-02-22T03:55:00.000+09:00

The Worst

Redneck 1: What's a yet?

Redneck 2: You mean a yeti?

Redneck 1: No, a yet. Like it says here in the paper, 'A woman was shot and doctors haven't removed the bullet from her yet.'

The Best

Paul McCartney is being interviewed in the wake of his recent divorce.

Interviewer: Do you think you'll ever go down on one knee again?

Sir Paul: No I don't, and please refer to her as Heather.

Shiny happy people

2007-02-16T04:56:00.000+09:00

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Patsy. She lived in a neighbourhood just like yours or mine. Patsy was a very bossy little girl and nobody liked her. She wanted people to like her, even more than she wanted them to be scared of her.

Patsy’s daddy gave her a job one day. She was to be in charge of mending all the broken dolls in the neighbourhood. Patsy wasn’t a very hard-working little girl and had no talents, so Daddy gave her lots and lots of money to pay other children with doll-mending skills to do the work.

The children in the neighbourhood all brought their dolls to be mended. One day some of the doll-menders came to Patsy. ‘There are more and more broken dolls in the neighbourhood, and we’re becoming better and better at mending them,’ they said. ‘We need more money because it’s becoming more expensive to do it properly.’

Patsy didn’t like the doll-menders. She was very jealous of them. So she said, ‘I think you just want the money to buy sweets for yourselves. I’m going to start checking up on you.’

She asked her daddy for more money. Daddy was very busy fighting all the other parents in the neighbourhood and beyond, and he said crossly, ‘This is all you’re getting,’ and threw some money at her. Patsy took the money and found some bullies and paid them to spy on the doll-menders. The bullies complained that they had nowhere to rest between spying, so Patsy told them to kick the doll-menders out of the Wendy houses where they were mending dolls and to sit in them themselves. She also gave them lots of paper to make planes with to keep them busy. The bullies loved making paper planes so much that they decided to make the doll-menders make lots of paper planes as well. The doll-menders complained that all this paper plane-making wasn’t leaving them much time to mend dolls. The bullies laughed at them and threatened to hit them.

One day the children in the neighbourhood came to see Patsy. They were crying and carrying bits of their broken dolls. ‘The doll-menders can’t mend our dolls any more,’ they said. ‘They’re either too busy or they’ve died of stress or killed themselves.’

‘Liars!’ shrieked Patsy, stamping her foot. ‘This has been the best week ever for doll-mending!’ She ran inside crying and told her daddy. Daddy made sure that a writer for a friendly newspaper wrote an article about how ungrateful the children in the neighbourhood were.

Soon the doll-menders were all dead, in mental homes or abroad. The streets were full of the broken arms and legs and heads of dolls. Daddy sighed. Even he had to admit that his darling little girl had made a right balls-up of things. He called Patsy, who was sulking in her room (which was decorated very prettily with all the lovely things Daddy’s money had bought her).

‘I don’t think doll-mending is for you,’ he said. ‘I’m giving you another job instead.’

And so, the next day, Patsy stood outside her house and looked proudly at the collection of little boys and girls in shiny police uniforms who were already hiding cameras about the street.

‘This time I’ll get it right!’ she vowed.

(Etc., etc.)

To the metal rocker

2007-02-08T04:56:00.000+09:00

I’d sit, a moody, acned, unloved cur,
In murk of teenage bedroom, sour and bored.
But feet and blood and loins would start to stir
At your first jarring, howling, shrieking chord.
Your playing was so savage that I swear
There’d be smoke coming from the record player.

A life of excess was the one for you:
The swankiest hotel rooms you destroyed.
You’d drink and snort and smoke and shoot and screw -
Our moral guardians were quite annoyed.
And in response, you trebled the outrage,
Decapitating rodents live on stage.

At social graces, rancid phlegm you spat;
Contempt for hygiene you did naught to hide.
You smelled as if a syphilitic rat
Crawled in your grandma’s knickers and there died.
Your beard, a foetid, cheesy, greasy merkin,
A haven was for alien life to lurk in.

Your music, all bass, feedback, drums and roars,
Made my head ache as though wolves ate my brain;
Yet still, against the floor and walls and doors
I’d bang my head again, again, again!
My air guitar I’d beat and thrash and pick -
A huge invisible surrogate prick.

I thought I’d grown up and left this behind
(A fam’ly man am I now, and mature).
But of your heyday I’m oft put in mind
When this ‘Nu-Metal’ shite I must endure.
You’d still put these pretending twats to shame
Although you walk with aid of Zimmer frame.

So dust your axe off once more, and crank up
The volume on the amp to more than ten.
And let’s drink deep from metal’s rusty cup
Lest sacch’rine safeness rot our ears again.
Though others at our folly sneer and scoff,
Let’s bang our bastard heads till they fall off.

Budapest: so much better than Prague

2007-02-04T11:58:00.000+09:00

Food, music, architecture, bars, literature, hotels, friendliness, clean streets, nightlife, Jethro Tull songs, romance, prices, historical resistance to oppressive regimes, bookshops, quirky museums, relative lack of pissed-up British stag weekenders.

Discuss.

A meeting of minds

2007-02-03T02:18:00.000+09:00

'These Korean meatballs really are the dog's bollocks.'

Walking home from a public house the other night, having refreshed myself with a single pint of finest ale, I was accosted by a stumbling, malodorous denizen of the shadows. ‘Yer a good fuckin’ mate, pal,’ he asserted. ‘Can ya spare us a fuckin’ tenner f’ra cab?’ (For the benefit of my American readers: he was requesting funds to the value of ten pounds sterling to purchase the services of a local taxi driver. Despite the adjective, no sexual intercourse was being proposed.)

‘You’ll just spend it on more drink,’ I suggested; at which his bonhomie disappeared, to be replaced with a microcosmic representation of the ugly face of modern Britain. (No, I don’t mean this.)

‘F’fuck’s sake, just give us the tenner.’

I remained immovable; a point of principle was at stake, plus I had no money on me. Instead of knifing me he began to stagger away, muttering, ‘Yer a stupid bastard.’

Quick as a flash, I retorted with an adaptation of my favourite Churchillism: ‘And you’re drunk, but at least you’ll be sober in the morning.’

It hung between us for a beat; then he said, ‘I rest my case,’ laughed raucously and weaved away into the night.

The haunted Mexican shithouse

2007-02-01T03:38:00.000+09:00

Mexico! Home of the sombrero, one of the world’s highest murder rates, and the Dirty Sanchez. The little lady and I went there recently on holiday, and what follows is an account of a terrifying supernatural experience I had during the trip. At the end of the account is a 'comments' section where you can post messages of astonishment and sympathy, as well as the usual abuse and attempts at character assassination I’ve come to expect since I first exposed my then young and unblemished soul to the world of the blog.

Vampirella and I were having dinner one evening in a cantina in P-- , a small village near Oaxaca. I’d bought myself a poncho and was practising being Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, though an English and therefore more awkward version. By this I mean I was leaning back in my chair with narrowed eyes, rolling a toothpick between my front teeth. Damn near swallowed the blasted thing when I hiccupped.

The atmosphere was perfect. The place was cramped, smoky, slightly grimy and packed with evil-looking locals with Zapata moustaches. A tone-deaf mariachi strolled between the tables, strumming aggressive-sounding love ditties and singing with much rolling of the tongue. He lingered leeringly over Vampirella, which I didn’t like. She’d obviously turned his head. She does that a lot. I mean it literally: she’s a physiotherapist and a lot of her work involves rehabilitating people’s neck muscles after they’ve been immobilised after accidents.

(I don’t mean to impugn the good name of Mexican musicians. Another night we were in a bar which featured a house band by the excellent name of Las Cucarachas. They did some truly wonderful covers of an extremely odd range of songs including Van Halen’s Jump and Every Day Is Like Sunday by The Smiths.)

The first round of frozen margharitas arrived. At the table with us, for reasons of space, was a bizarre couple called Nick and Shelley, except she was Nick and he was Shelley. Shelley was a braying, toothy fool from London who did something or other in computers but seemed to be stuck in an eternal gap year at the age of 35. He liked to laugh halitotically and shout fark OFF! in response to everything anyone said to him. Nick was a ruddy, rawboned Australian with a faint moustache and a large Adam’s apple that made me wonder if she’d started life with one more Y chromosome than she’d now allow for. She howled like some Lovecraftian being at every joke Shelley cracked. (The jokes were myriad. The only good one was this:

What do you get if you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with an atheist?
Someone who goes from door to door for no reason.)

I can’t believe I just used the word myriad. Anyway: the food was served, together with beer, and Nick and Shelley became a little more bearable, or at least ignorable. I had delicious enchiladas with succulent chicken, rice, tomatoes, lettuce, sour cream, guacamole and salsa, with side dishes of green and red sliced jalapeno peppers hot enough to burn away your hard palate and expose your nasal cavity, and a big bowl of nachos slathered with melted cheese. Vampirella had the poncey vegetarian rabbit food she likes.

It was a while after the food had been consumed that I began to hear nature’s siren song. Now, it’s well known that a trip to Mehico isn’t complete without a good dose of rear-end action, and before the perverts among you get all hot and bothered I’m not talking about that. I mean the splatters, the tears of the brown-eyed monster, the fudge-tunnel express. But I wasn’t yet to experience that. (That came a few days later when I found myself atop a cold porcelain throne in a hotel room, my screams rending the night.) No, I was rocking back in my chair when I became aware of the effects of two margharitas and four bottles of Corona filtered through my kidneys. I excused myself and picked my way over to the restroom at the back.

The room was tiny, with a sloping ceiling that made it impossible to stand upright at the correct distance from the toilet. The walls were papered with pages from Playboy magazine, and I don’t mean the articles about cars or sports. The toilet itself was a foul, stinking hole. I began to feel queasy. I have no Scots or Irish in me and therefore can’t hold my drink very well (though sheep I have no problem holding, look you). Adopting an awkward, splay-legged posture with my back arched, I managed to stand in front of the bowl without bashing my head on the slope of the ceiling. I began to do the necessary.

After what seemed like an age, the flow dried up. I felt light-headed. There’s a phenomenon known as micturition syncope in which dizziness and sometimes fainting accompany the passing of urine, because of a complicated series of hormonal releases. It must have been this I was experiencing; it certainly wasn’t anything to do with the three martinis and bottle of Zinfandel I’d necked. My gaze hovered over the toilet until I spotted what I was looking for. The flushing lever, as is usually the case in toilets on the American continent, was low down, low enough that it could be pressed down with one’s foot. This pleased me. I had no desire to touch any part of that dirty bog with any uncovered part of me. It pleased me so much I paused for a few seconds, smiling. Then I raised my left foot while bending my right knee for balance, and lowered the foot on to the flusher. And it was then it happened, O my brothers and sisters, something so awesome that dread Cthulhu himself would have quailed before the majestic horror of it.

The toilet moved.

It swung slowly, almost ethereally, to the left so that my foot, descending on the flushing lever, planted itself in the bowl. I reacted to the sensation around my ankle – what was shocking was not that it was cold, rather that it was unpleasantly warm – by jerking my foot up again; in the process I lost my balance and banged my head on the sloping ceiling. Miss November clearly had implants but even so I hadn’t expected her bosom to be quite so hard. It was only my terror of landing with my head down the bowl that kept me upright enough to stumble out of the shithouse. I didn’t even bother to close the door after me – the toilet might be following me and I didn’t want to lose precious time.

Vampirella didn’t remark on my piss-sodden foot and ankle – I had just been to a men’s restroom, after all - but the apparently bleeding graze on my forehead did bother her. ‘I told you you shouldn’t have had that fourth Sambucca,’ she chided. I was about to protest that my physical state had nothing to do with inebriation and everything to do with a haunted, malevolent toilet, but I thought better of it. Why should she believe me? Why should any of you? The only person I’ve ever heard of who seems to have had a similar experience is Shane McGowan.

Anyway, despite all this, Mexico’s a great place. Go there. But catheterise yourself first.

Urgent bogroll poll

2007-01-24T06:16:00.000+09:00

Quick! Tell me, when you're fitting a new toilet roll, do you hang it with the free end:

1. Nearest the wall?

2. Nearest the user?

The response I get will be of crucial importance to my next, more substantial post about my recent terrifying experience in a haunted shithouse in Mexico.

Will get round to visiting your bogs - sorry, blogs - when I've recovered.

Suspicious mind

2007-01-06T02:59:00.000+09:00

'Gee, Jackie, I'm sure glad I got rid of that headache...'

To mark the 500th (-ish) month since the assassination of President John F Kennedy I thought I’d share with you some of the work I’ve been doing for the US government looking into just who did do the dirty deed. Strictly speaking this is classified stuff, but I’m satisfied that I’m anonymous enough on this blog that my employers won’t be able to work out who Foot Eater is. Also, if any of you snitch on me, I’ll deny everything and release the dossier I have on you (yes, you too, hiding there so pretty and sweetly loitering, to misparaphrase Keats).

Anyway: I reckon the man who did it was someone I’ve had my suspicions about for years. E. A. Presley was a drifter who had just got out of the US Army in 1960 and had embarked upon a critically disastrous acting career following a string of reasonably successful popular musical records. By all accounts Presley was a nasty piece of work. He was contemptuous of racial harmony and Kennedy’s liberalism must have stuck in his craw. He was under the mentorship of the shadowy ‘Colonel Parker’, a man whose title suggests sinister military links. Not one of the official reports on the assassination has queried, nor even mentioned, Presley’s whereabouts on November 22nd, 1963, which is telling in itself; and if they had, they would have come up against a wall of silence.

Nobody I have spoken to knows where E. A. Presley was that day.

Add to this the backwardly-masked refrain grassy knoll on Presley’s 1974 single Raised On Rock, and his suspicious ‘death’ in 1977, the circumstances of which continue to be disputed, and I think you’ll agree the case is, if not watertight in a strictly legal sense, rather compelling.

But if it wasn’t him then it was the KGB, the CIA or the Mafia.

Stick with me, kid, and you'll wear diamonds

2007-01-01T02:57:00.000+09:00

This is it. This year, 2007, is the one in which I make my fortune, jettison the rat-race and get stinking rich. Look at some of these ideas.

1. People like to read in the bath, yes? But more people shower nowadays than have baths, because of time constraints in this frenetic world we live in. So the time has come for waterproof books and newspapers, to be enjoyed in the shower. A spin-off product could be a stand on which to prop the reading material of choice so that you can wash your genitals and other parts while perusing.

2. If the Pythons can rehash The Holy Grail as Spamalot and have a hit, then I’m damned if I’m going to miss out. Reservoir Dogs: we’ve all seen it, we’ve all loved it. It’s time for the ballet.

3. Non-illegal hashish. There’s got to be a way to do it.

4. Nanobot gargle. Swill a throatful around your pharynx and microscopic robots clean your glottis, your teeth and your tongue, leaving them all sparkling with minty-fresh goodness.

5. Naffness-detecting software. It erases poorly-conceived humour as you type it into your blog and replaces it with cutting wit.

6. Men! Ever catch your John Thomas in your zip, or slam your nads against a bicycle seat? We’ve all done it. New, silky BulgeGard, made from supple Kevlar, fits snugly around your meat-and-two-veg and shields them from injury (up to and including nuclear attack) while preserving those woman-enticing contours so you can even wear it under your Speedo on the beach.

7. Like you, I’m sure, I’ve always wanted to swing a chainsaw around in a crowded shopping centre without ending up in prison for it. How about a non-injurious chainsaw? Or, failing that, foolproof fake ID that allows you to pose as a government agent and thereby avoid charges of any kind?

8. Twat-zapper. Not a sex toy, this, but rather a remote device that delivers an extremely painful electric shock to the anus of the BBC’s executive directors every time I turn on the telly and despair at what’s on.

9. Graffiti-repelling front-door paint, so that I don’t have to wake up every morning with the word Wanker adorning the portal to my home.

10. Tiny garden landmines that can be triggered only by creatures the size of moles. They would get rid of the squirrels and cats too.

I need capital, though. Let me know if you’re interested, and please be assured that I will use your credit card details responsibly. We can do this, people.

Happy New Year.

Oh, go on then, bloody hell

2006-12-23T06:05:00.000+09:00

Many years ago my uncle Pete decided to start up an apiary. Ignoring the disparaging remarks from his friends and family that he’d never find enough chimpanzees and gorillas to fill it, he did some research and before long had built up quite a collection of bees. There were big ones and small ones and some medium ones as well. I always felt he’d rather missed the point of the whole enterprise, though, as his apiary consisted of a corkboard glued on the wall of his garden shed with dead bees Sellotaped to it.

Except that’s not entirely true, as he didn’t have a garden shed, nor did he collect bees. As a matter of fact I never had an Uncle Pete either. I relate this story to illustrate the life lesson that fiction is quite often duller than the truth, especially when it’s my fiction, not that I tell the truth often enough to provide a basis for comparison. So when you tell lies, do so flamboyantly.

Oh, and bees - sting - Stingray - car - Chrysler - Chrysler building - Art Deco, in case you were wondering.

See, I told you this would be a killer post. If you’re not dead of boredom then my credibility at least is shot through the heart.

Now I really am off.

That was the year that was

2006-12-20T03:58:00.000+09:00

The Fishwhacker Swindle? is a year old today. As those of you whose birthdays fall around this time of year will know, Christmas tends to eclipse this momentous event. Please don't wish me a happy blogday; I can't bear that word.

It's been a good year, all told. I started this blog on a whim one evening after spending some time irritating people in the comments sections of their blogs. In the beginning I had no idea what to post about and decided that swearing and shouting was a way to get attention. Over the year I've posted some things I still rather like when I reread them, as well as some spectacular duds. But I wouldn't delete any of it.

Now, I constantly have ideas for posts, but no longer the time to give blogging the attention it requires. It's not just writing the posts, it's responding to the comments and doing justice to posts on other people's blogs, and I just can't keep up.

This isn't a last testament from a deathbed, but rather an apologia from the blogging equivalent of an elderly man who can no longer rise to the occasion, as it were, as regularly and satisfyingly as before. What I mean is, I'm having to slow down. This site will stay up, but posting will be sporadic, as in monthly, quarterly, annually or however it pans out. I'll still haunt your blogs from time to time and crop up in the comments like a dog humping your leg (or, more appropriately, chewing your foot).

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Foot Eater

A Christmas tale

2006-12-16T02:36:00.000+09:00

Timmy was a star pupil,
A beacon at his school;
He’d outperform each boy and girl
And never play the fool.

His sums were always quite correct,
His drawings made one gasp.
There was but one minor subject
Which Timmy failed to grasp –

At maths and science he’d excel,
But sadly, clever Tim
For the life of him could not spell!
It truly flummoxed him.

There, their or they’re? he’d ask himself,
Sine, sign? Mane, main or mean?
He’d pore o’er heath, hearth, heart and health
While pikking his nose kleen.

‘Who cares?’ he’d laugh. ‘Spelling is gay.
It means nothing to me.’
His dumbed-down teachers, sad to say,
Could do naught but agree.

When Yuletide drew near, Timothy
To Father Christmas wrote:
‘I wont a Soany PSP,
A mobyl fone, a bote,

A kar, a plain, a spais roket,
A laptopp with brawdband.’
He sealed the letter and stamped it,
And sent it to Lapland.

On Christmas Eve he couldn’t sleep.
He lay in bed, listening
For noise of Santa’s stealthy creep
Down chimney, gifts bearing.

At midnight he sat up in bed
Straining hard with his ears;
And through the darkness came the tread
Of heavy foot on stairs.

The door swung wide and Timmy screamed,
Seized with unholy fear;
The foulest nightmare ever dreamed
Was standing laughing there:

Red Santa clothes it wore, and beard,
All matted, grey and rank;
From its fanged maw small serpents reared;
Of charnel house it stank.

Its face, blasted, blemished, pockmarked,
Encrusted with green pus,
Held eyes dull yellow in the dark.
It commenced speaking, thus:

‘Don’t look so shocked, my wee laddie!’
(Advancing without pause.)
‘I’m here because you wrote to me –
My name is Santa Claws.’

That was Timmy’s last Christmas; so,
Take care and learn to spell;
Or, boys and girls, next ‘Ho, ho, ho,’
Might be your last as well!

Plea

2006-12-14T07:46:00.000+09:00

Nobody mention bees or Art Deco in the next few posts on your blog, please. I have a killer post planned and I'd appreciate it if you didn't steal my thunder.

Thanks.

What I did on my holiday

2006-12-13T05:10:00.000+09:00

Last weekend I was on a mini-break at an unspecified Atlantic island resort when the manager of the hotel came up to me. 'Mr Eater,' he said, 'I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to stop urinating in the swimming pool.'

I haven't felt such outrage since I was six years old and wanted to join the Scouts but my parents sent me to that Satanic cult instead.

'What are you on about?' I asked. 'Everyone urinates in the swimming pool.'

'Yes, but from the diving board?'

Phantasy

2006-12-07T08:33:00.000+09:00

If I were filthy, stinking rich, I wouldn’t squander my fortune on fast cars in St Tropez, opulent Alpine skiing jaunts or Malibu condos.

No.

I would buy a castle. A huge, crumbling castle somewhere in Scotland or Ireland or perhaps somewhere on the Continent such as Germany or Eastern Europe. And in this castle I would indulge my tastes for the Victorian, the Gothic, the mediaeval.

Much of the castle would be left in disrepair. There would be wings I never set foot in, for my future offspring to explore to their hearts’ delight, full of secret panels and trapdoors and dusty rooms containing nothing but a table and a mysterious lamp.

The castle would have an enormous entrance hall hung with paintings by Turner, Goya and the Pre-Raphaelites. The dining room would flaunt a huge oaken table at which my bride and I would partake of candle-lit suppers under the gaze of The Lady of Shalott.

The library would be soaked in books, leatherbound volumes whose spines I would be afraid to crack for fear of spilling the riches within. An attendant would hover silently to grant my wishes but disappear when I so required. With the finest brandy at my elbow I would pore over ancient grimoires for hours until the sputtering candles burned low.

My lady and I would live in the upper floors. The lower ones would be given over to the staff, who would be discreet and reticent when serving us but in return would be permitted Bacchanalian rampages in the castle’s depths during their spare time.

A room would be given over to mechanical contraptions of astonishing invention; another, to advanced chemistry facilities and experiments. A third, perhaps a long narrow hall, would contain stuffed creatures from the four corners of the earth, from the humblest shrew to the mightiest ursine predator.

Before the castle would plunge a valley forested with pine, through whose snow-drowned slopes wild beasts would lope and bay in the winter’s night.

Behind the castle would rise terrifying black mountains from whose summits at intervals massive sheets of ice would plummet and crash like frozen waterfalls.

Modern conveniences would be retained where necessary. There would be electric lighting, 21st century plumbing and wireless broadband internet access, as well as a home cinema which would feature regular screenings of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari among numerous others.

Great parties we would throw in full mediaeval dress, with an abundance of meat and wine and live music provided by Jethro Tull.

My love and I would stand atop the castle’s ramparts in the fury of a summer’s storm, she in billowing chiffon and I in gleaming hat and tails, and I would play the violin until I woke the gods.

Not filler, no, never

2006-12-07T05:29:00.000+09:00

Dissatisfied with the name your parents gave you? Spare a thought for these poor souls.

I don't think so

2006-12-06T06:48:00.000+09:00

’Tis the season to be jolly. So, in the spirit of Scrooge, I offer up five things everyone else seems to adore but which I hate. In my Renaissance Man way I’m covering the categories of food, drink, cinema, literature and art.

Sundried tomatoes. What the fuck. Acrid, chewy little horrors that look like Granny’s desiccated labia and taste like something dead and left to rot in a swamp. People seem to use them to give a pretentious, ooh-la-la piquancy to just about every dish these days. Would Sir like a sundried tomato liqueur with his sundried tomato porridge? Evil shit.

Lager. Flavourless, pissy and fight-provoking, this truly is a drink for the great unwashed, who would do better to bathe in it, preferably near a naked flame; or it could be used to treat people who have taken an overdose, since it usually seems to end up back on the outside of a drinker’s gastrointestinal tract. On the rare occasion I'm forced to drink it, I’m overwhelmed afterwards by feelings of dirtiness and self-hate. It is not beer.

Fight Club. One of the worst films ever made, this waste of celluloid is all the more risible for taking itself so seriously. The so-called plot twist is one of the corniest and most predictable in recent years, in the same league as the one from the also crap and overrated The Sixth Sense. If you get your rocks off watching ninety minutes’ worth of men punching each other mindlessly or, more suspiciously given that it’s a ‘lad’s film’, half-naked, sweaty and breathing heavily, then this is the flick for you.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt. You what? A tedious sub-John Fowles ‘thriller’ by an author with a name like a misspelled harlot, about a bunch of wanky students who when they’re not disappearing up their own arses are wallowing in a weird orgy of academic narcissism with their Andy Warhol-like tutor. Loved by students, schoolkids who are looking forward to being students, people who are jealous about not being students, and would-be philosophers who read far more meaning into it than it warrants, this is worth ploughing through only when you’re drunk or stoned and laughing all the way - at it, not with it (it’s ball-achingly humourless). I won’t give away the plot, but I do wish more of the characters had died. Hell, I almost wished I had died when I realised I was only halfway through it.

Jackson Pollock. I’ve produced more ‘significant’, ‘relevant’ ‘art’ in a similar vein down my toilet bowl at the end of a night’s hurling. He was a drunk, an onanist and a fraud, and his dad couldn’t even spell Pillock on the birth certificate.

And yes, Andraste did something similar a while ago on the topic of music. I’m thinking of renaming this blog The Thieving Magpie, or perhaps The Scouser.

Desert Island Discs

2006-12-02T11:51:00.000+09:00

BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs has long been a favourite of mine, smug middle-classer that I am. (For foreigners: the British middle classes are the rulers of the world, although middle-classers who use the word foreigner unironically as I just have are class traitors and completely confused.) Anyway. For the last God knows how many years DID has been presented by Sue Lawley, but she had to relinquish the role a few months ago because she retired or died or something. Kirsty Young picked up the mantle.

Now Kirsty is hot property. She’s blonde, undeniably pretty, and possessed of a deliciously throaty, sexy Scottish voice that cannot fail to stimulate a throbbing in the groin of any man, even if he is an ancient one-legged bullshitter like this. She’s had some good guests in her short tenure, not least Stephen King, who proved himself to be an immensely witty and likeable man as well as a fellow of impeccable musical tastes. Anybody who would take both Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to a desert island and immerse himself in their outpourings is my kind of chap.

However. A few weeks ago Kirsty had the triple-Michelin-starred chef Heston Blumenthal on the show. Apparently he runs the best restaurant in the world. Myself, I like to eat food, not art, but what the fuck do I know. Blumenthal was talking about his early days and, as usually happens nowadays with Radio Four presenters, Kirst interrupted him rudely:

‘Then you became an office furniture salesman. Soul-destroying work.’

It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. And it pissed me right off. I have a friend in his early sixties who is really and truly an office furniture salesman, and he loves his job and dreads the day when he will be forced to retire. But to a pampered, cosseted, closeted media type like Kirsty Young, salesmanship is soul-destroying. Deriving a wage from a source away from the public teat is soul-destroying. Earning a living by repetitive, sweat-inducing slog is soul-destroying. Any line of work other than that of flitting around in the delusional smoke-and-mirrors world of the fucking BBC is soul-destroying.

Kirsty, you’re in your mid-thirties. Get a grip and grow up. Get your hands dirty. Try working to an alarm clock every morning, and try accepting work that you don’t really want to do, just for one week. I know it’s hard, love, and your stylist and Sushi chef won’t be impressed. But your self esteem will be boosted no end. And that’s the point.

Bleeding pissheads

2006-11-30T01:59:00.000+09:00

One afternoon I arrived at Shipmanville Hospital’s Accident & Emergency Department to begin a late shift. It was a weekday afternoon, traditionally a quiet time, and so there were only two of us per shift, on this occasion Dick and I. The casualty officers we were relieving had very little to hand over to us apart from two patients, a little old lady sitting quietly on a chair and a skinny young man groaning on a stretcher.

Dick made a beeline for the little old lady so I went into the cubicle with the young man and drew the curtain. The smell hit me instantly and I wrote in his notes: Ethanol +++. He was wearing a grimy T-shirt spattered with blood over one shoulder. His bleary, unfocused gaze wandered over me.

‘You doctor?’ he slurred. Liverpool. I nodded and introduced myself.

‘Gorra fuckin’ help me, mate,’ he moaned. He delivered the ck sound as though he was hawking up catarrh.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

He stared at me. ‘You’re the fuckin’ doctor, you tell me.’

Jesus. ‘You’re bleeding from your shoulder,’ I remarked. He frowned and tilted his head jerkily to peer at his shoulder. His eyes widened and he began to scream.

‘I’m bleeding! I’m stabbed!’

I managed to calm him down eventually. It turned out to be a wooden splinter from a door frame he’d barged into.

‘How many stitches am I going to need?’ he asked fearfully.

‘Perhaps an Elastoplast,’ I said.

In those days I was still a bleeding heart do-gooder so I decided to try a little counselling with him before he went home. I suggested that it might be in his interest to cut down on the daytime drinking.

‘Ah, fuckin’ grow up, ya bastarr,’ he snarled, and spewed rich brown vomit over the side of the bed.

I took my leave. Dick’s little old lady turned out to have a nastily fractured wrist, which she had been sitting with stoically and silently for the previous two hours.

About a month later, I had a day off and was doing some shopping in the morning for a party I was throwing the following weekend. I went into an off licence – liquor store to you unBritish – and loaded up a trolley with beer, wine, vodka, Scotch, gin and cider. I reached the counter. Standing behind it was the man with the shoulder splinter.

The transaction passed in silence, which was probably just as well. And if you think this is a bit of an anticlimax, remember that even small embarrassments can punctuate a life far more acutely than can conventional moments of drama. Here endeth the lesson.

Newsflash

2006-11-28T05:07:00.000+09:00

The Kremlin has issued a statement casting doubt on whether former KGB colonel Alexander Litvinenko is really dead. President Putin said this afternoon, 'He's looked too healthy to be a dying man. In that picture of him in the hospital he's positively glowing.'

Update!

That was a joke. Read it carefully.

Blogmare

2006-11-25T03:10:00.000+09:00

Blogging can creep all over your life like a yeast infection. Only a couple of nights ago I was seized by a terrible dream in which I was on the run from people who were trying to harm me because of inaccuracies in my pork pie post. I was taking a detour through a park when chainsaw-voiced troubadour Tom Waits came bouncing up on a pogo stick.

‘The origin you gave for the term pork pie was wrong,’ he said, bouncing gently on the spot like Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout. ‘The man who fell into the grinding machine was a dwarf, a Person Of Restricted Growth. So the name is a corruption of PORG pie.’

And away he bounced, boing, boing.

Interview with the Wolf

2006-11-23T04:12:00.001+09:00

Earlier this week I caught up with recently deceased former East German spymaster Markus Wolf and was granted an exclusive interview, which I conducted using a nifty piece of software called SeanceNet that allows you to communicate with people beyond the grave. A transcript follows.

Foot Eater: Markus Wolf, thank you for agreeing to this interview.
Markus Wolf: My pleasure.
FE: First of all, the Cold War. How cold was it?
MW: Hah…?
FE: Ha ha, just a joke. Seriously, your name. Markus Wolf. Pretty cool, isn’t it?
MW: Sank you. But it voss not my real name –
FE: Hang on a sec. [Adjusts accent mode on SeanceNet program] Sorry, go on.
MW: I was saying it wasn’t my real name. I was christened Helmut Scheissburger. I chose Markus Wolf because it sounded kind of funky.
FE: Fair enough. I mean, East Germany was a happening place, wasn’t it? Bit of a groove going?
MW: Yes, but remember that I changed my name before Germany was partitioned. My father had fled the Nazis and taken me and my mother to Moscow.
FE: Ah.
MW: And Stalin was about as hip-hop as they come.
FE: I was going to ask about that. That whole Communism thing you got into, and set up in East Germany. What was all that about?
MW: Good question. We had this idea that a centrally planned and controlled system would bring about paradise on earth for everybody.
FE: Kind of like the British National Health Service.
MW: Yes, but with torture chambers.
FE: The NHS has those. They’re called wards.
MW: Well, our system had chronic shortages of basic supplies…
FE: Yes, ours too.
MW: …Interminable waiting lists for everything…
FE: Quite.
MW: …And a network of secret police to monitor the activities of people living and working within the system.
FE: Hospital managers.
MW: Our buildings were either crumbling ruins that hadn’t been restored after the war, or soulless modern concrete architectural outrages.
FE: Mmm…
MW: Our food was terrible, our staff surly and our populace demoralised, angry and drunk.
FE: Right.
MW: And the only way to escape our system was to buy your way out, or to die.
FE: Ah.

Pause.

Mr Wolf, to the end of your life you maintained that your side won the Cold War. Would you care to elaborate?

But he’d vanished into the ether.

Toby and the Toy Inspectors

2006-11-21T03:21:00.000+09:00

Toby was a well-loved lad,
He made his parents proud.
He never cried or wet the bed
Or sulked, or played too loud.

One fault, though, ’smirched this paragon,
This virtuous little gem:
He’d strew his toys about his room
And never tidy them.

Toy cars, soldiers, guns, bricks and balls
Lay knee-deep on his floor.
Grandma, after nine nasty falls,
Stopped coming to his door.

No matter how his mother wailed
And gnashed her teeth, and wept,
The toy-strewn chaos yet prevailed
And in its midst he slept.

One night he woke in dim moonlight,
Roused by a hissing noise,
And froze in wide-eyed mortal fright
For, there amongst his toys -

Stood two men. One was short and fat,
The other tall and thin.
Each dressed in black coat and top hat
They stood there watching him.

‘Tut, tut,’ hissed the tall man as he
Surveyed the mess of toys.
‘What do we do, Mister Eerie,
With such untidy boys?’

‘Well, Creepy, mate,’ said his fat pal,
A smirk about his face.
‘This gross abuse of toys is vile,
A really serious case.’

‘I’ll tidy up the mess I’ve made!’
Cried Toby on the floor,
Scrabbling to pack neatly away
The bits of a jigsaw.

‘Too late!’ laughed the Toy Inspectors,
Advancing on Toby.
And next day, bringing his kippers,
Mum found his bed empty.

He’d disappeared for ever more.
His parents sold each toy.
The jigsaw’s scattered ’cross the floor
Of another small boy.

The puzzle, a bland Constable,
Shows little trapped Toby,
Face twisted in a silent wail
For all eternity.

So, children, put away your toys,
Or by God’s blood, it’s true:
The Toy Inspectors, girls and boys,
Will come and visit you.

The Misreading

2006-11-17T05:31:00.000+09:00

Anyway so like I’m in this new job yeah, and Brenda the social worker says it’s like a good opportunity but it’s well boring right, but if I stick with it for six months they’ll forget about that shoplifting offence which wasn’t even my fault anyway yeah.

So anyway like in this job I have to go to this office in this building with all these gates and walls and guards with dogs and I have to be there at half eight in the morning which well pisses me off yeah and my solicitor reckons it’s against my human rights to have to get up so early and she’s looking into it. The first day I go there in my hoodie and these well wicked trackie bums and trainers which are real Nike though my mate Kez said they wasn’t so I decked him. Anyway I’m there at the gate in my well hard get-up right, and they won’t let me in and I have to go away and come back in this well gay shirt and tie and trousers like someone posh off the telly.

Like so anyway in this job I have to take messages from one part of the building to another, and the messages are like so secret they can’t phone or email them to each other right, but the messages get put in this suitcase and it gets chained to my wrist, it looks well gay like a handbag. The other people who work here are all like well old yeah, thirty at least, and there are a few right posh old farts in gay suits and waistcoats who never even look at me when I go past them. My boss is this old bird but quite fit, but she walks round like she’s got a broom up her arse and never smiles, she needs a good seeing to yeah. The guards at the front gates look well hard like Vin Diesel with their uniforms and guns, but they never say anything when I talk to them either right.

So like anyway one day I’ve got nothing to do and I’ve got my Gameboy out and then there’s this big panic on and people running everywhere and my boss calls me and she’s looking shit scared even though she’s not supposed to show it yeah, and she chains the message bag to my wrist and sends me underground to some bloke I’ve never delivered to before. And I go down there yeah, and there’s all these wicked steel doors I have to go through and then I get to this bloke’s room and he’s well old, like sixty, and I give him the bag and he opens it and says can I read the message inside because he’s forgotten his glasses, and I’m like shit, nobody ever said I had to read in this job, reading is so gay, but I read it out best I can and he’s well scared and shaking and he sends me away.

Anyway like so I’m playing on the Gameboy later and my boss comes over and she’s still shit scared and well pissed off yeah and holding a piece of paper. She says what does it say here, and I look at the paper and it’s the one I read out to the old fart right, and I say it says select nuclear response and she says no it doesn’t it says reject nuclear response.

Like whatever yeah. Maybe they’ll sack me now. This job is so gay anyway.

Hats off to the pork pie

2006-11-14T02:50:00.000+09:00

The pork pie is truly one of the marvels of British inventiveness. Compact, nourishing and flavoursome, it ought to be part of every Briton’s daily diet as it is of mine.

For you Johnny Foreigners who don’t know what it is, the pork pie comprises an oily pastry shell in the shape of a stumpy cylinder surrounding a gelatinous meaty filling. Despite the name, the meat is not in fact pork, but an amalgam including mutton, tripes and human flesh. The delicacy came into being by accident in 1853 when one Guy Trumpton, a worker at a meat pie factory in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, fell drunkenly into one of the grinding machines and got mixed in with the sheeps’ brains and offal which formed the traditional filling. His absence was noted only after the next batch of pies had been delivered to retailers, but the altered filling proved a surprise hit and soon orders for the new ‘Poor Guy’ – of which pork pie is a corruption – were being churned out as quickly as the local prisons and graverobbers could supply the constituent material. Before long they began to appear on Queen Victoria’s table, and it is said that the Kaiser’s surrender in 1918 was celebrated by the ritual partaking of a giant pork pie in the shape of Germany (along with much Morris dancing and sodomy).

Here are some reasons why pork pies deserve to be better known.

1. You can eat them as a snack or a complete meal, so many different sizes do they come in.

2. You don’t have to cook them.

3. After refrigeration or freezing, they make excellent cricket balls, ice hockey pucks and projectiles for hurling at the enemy team during football matches.

4. With a slow-burning fuse attached, they would serve well as incendiary grenades. I have never heard of them used as such, but the amount of oil in the pastry suggests high flammability.

5. They are hardier than human beings. Try this experiment: throw a pork pie and a person from the roof of a thirty storey building. Which makes the bigger mess?

6. Their glutinous character induces drowsiness after eating them. This is excellent news for parents and teachers, as they can be fed to children to pacify them and thus reduce the risk of the little shits engaging in the crack abuse and devil worship we hear so much about these days.

7. They are an ideal culinary accompaniment to the use of pornography, as they impart a greasy slickness to the fingers which facilitates lubrication.

8. They repel the fairer sex, which will be appreciated by those of you subject to the exhausting attentions of nymphomaniacs.

9. The English gentleman abroad cannot afford to let his sartorial flair slip for even a moment. So what happens when the heel on one of your Gieves & Hawkes patent leather spats breaks off at an Embassy bash after all the heel bars have closed for the night? Humiliation, that’s what. Unless you happen to have with you some glue and… need I say it?

10. At Christmas time the pastry shells can be used in miniature Nativity scenes as authentic-looking frankincense and myrrh pots. The meat filling can also be flattened out and used to represent the Christ child’s afterbirth.

I hope I’ve persuaded you. With the festive season coming up, why not treat yourself?

Not filler at all

2006-11-11T21:41:00.000+09:00

I'm in a foul mood, so for one post only I'm turning the comments over to gratuitous abuse. Feel free to try and insult me, and rest assured that no matter what you say, my reply will be four times more offensive.

If this doesn't interest you, then fuck off and click on my new links, Kieran and Kav. No, I don't know why they both start with a K either. I suspect they're lovers.

Ode to a nightingale

2006-11-08T02:44:00.000+09:00

Perhaps I’ve given the impression in previous posts that everybody who works in a hospital is a backbiting snake. This is not the case, as the following heartwarming tale shows. Unlike most of the shit I write on this site, this story is completely true.

In my second six months as a house officer I worked on a medical, as opposed to surgical, unit. Our stock-in-trade was diseased lungs, guts and limbs for the most part, with other organs like the brain and the kidneys going to the specialist disciplines of neurology and nephrology. One night I was on ward call. These vicious exercises in sadism consisted of carrying the bleep for 16 hours between five p.m. and nine a.m. and responding to any calls, emergency or otherwise, from the inpatient wards, as opposed to casualty. During this time you were the sole doctor responsible for the care of some five hundred patients. You were lucky to get two hours’ sleep, and broken at that. Furthermore, there was a full eight-hour working day on either side of this stretch. These young doctors nowadays don’t know how easy they have it, etc., etc.

Anyway, a couple of hours after my ward call started I went to the canteen to have dinner with a fellow house officer who was on call for casualty. We shuffled in line like Soviet factory workers and watched the local swill being slung into our bowls. It was the early 1990s and we used to call the stuff Dan Quayle stew because it was thick as pigshit. At the till I insisted on paying for us both. Chris, my dining companion, looked at me sharply.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

We sat down, I grievously insulted by his suspiciousness, he still battling a hangover at seven in the evening. He looked as if he was recovering from an autopsy.

I tried making small talk but he asked again what I wanted so I asked him if he could swap shifts with me in a couple of weeks’ time as I wanted to go on holiday but he said no and I asked again and he still said no and I tried to bribe him and then threatened him.

He put his fingers in his ears and said, ‘La la la, not listening.’

As the surgeon said when he accidentally severed a major artery, aorta known better.

So I was in a foul mood when my bleep went off and I stormed out of the canteen. The extension number of one of the gastrointestinal wards came up on the screen of the bleep and I didn’t bother to ring them, just headed straight over. I was greeted at the entrance to the ward by the sister in charge who told me that I had been summoned to certify a patient as dead.

‘Liver?’ I asked. The hospital didn’t have a separate liver unit and most patients with hepatic failure were on the more general GI wards. They were the patients who tended to die on these wards, as the liver doesn’t repair itself very well. She nodded.

I checked that my pencil torch was working (for observing the patient’s pupils) and filled a large syringe with water (for squirting in his ears to test for a reaction), then wandered over. I paused at the patient’s bedside for a moment, then went back to check the bed number with the sister again, then returned to the patient.

He was a young man with a wasted physique and an abdomen swollen from the fluid that accumulates in chronic liver failure. His eyes were the dead yellow of jaundice. And the moans coming from his throat were those of a slowly dying man.

Yes, dying.

I went back to the nurses’ station. ‘Sister,’ I said, ‘he’s still alive.’

‘I know, but he’ll probably die tonight, so we thought we’d call you to certify him now to avoid having to wake you up later.’

The patient passed over some time in the early hours of the morning, and I came and certified him dead at about four a.m. I like to think that his final hours were made more comfortable by the peachy glow engendered on the ward by such a display of altruism, and that he greeted St Peter with a smile on his jaundiced lips.

Send 'em back

2006-11-03T08:20:00.000+09:00

Now I’m as open-minded as the man on the Clapham omnibus, but allowing Romania to join the European Union next year is just asking for trouble. Before you know it we’ll have hordes of vampires streaming across our borders. It was bad enough when that earl or baronet or whoever he was landed at Whitby more than a century ago bringing his murderous foreign undead ways with him, and there was only one of him.

After I’d disposed of the last of the zombies* – which I ended up doing single-handedly despite my appeal, so thanks for nothing – I barely had time to draw breath before a new menace announced itself. Four doors down who should move in but a Romanian family, the Klavinses: Valdis and Anna and their two children, Kaspars and Monika. Technically they’re Latvian, but I’m not going to let a geographical nicety get in the way when the fate of the human race is hanging in the balance. The father, Valdis, was friendly enough but his name is a giveaway, containing as it does the name Vlad, as in Vlad Drakul, the grandfather of all vampires. So I started to do some detective work.

First I checked their dustbins, as you can discover all sorts of things about people from what they throw away. What should I find but sunblock, and lots of it. Granted, it was a hot July and the twins, Kaspars and Monika, were fair-skinned and only six, but really, you do have to wonder about such a fear of sunlight, don’t you?

Next, the little girl Monika came up the road one day to say hello while I was watering the lawn with the garden hose. I sent a stream of water in her direction and she ran away crying. Fear of running water? Yes? Do you see a pattern emerging?

After that I sneaked out one night and planted a six-foot tall wooden cross in their front lawn. I got up at daybreak and watched their house through the net curtains. Before long both Valdis and Anna were at the front door, staring at the cross. Looking perplexed and, yes, scared.

The clincher came just a few days ago on Halloween. At about seven in the evening the doorbell went and Anna was there with the twins, who were in costume, Kaspars as a pumpkin and Monika as a ghost. Ha! I went to fetch the special chocolates I’d prepared earlier and handed the box to Kaspars. He bit into one greedily and cried out and spat it on the ground. Anna hurried them away with a look over her shoulder at me. Well, well. The little undead bastard hadn’t liked the taste of garlic. Funny, that.

Today I went to Homebase and bought a mallet and a dozen lengths of wood, the ends of which I’m sitting and whittling to sharp points. When I’m ready I’m going down the road. I might not come back. If I don’t, please remember this message. There’s too much at stake not to. (That was a pun.)

*My wife and the police claim I imagined the zombie invasion but I know you believed me.

Uncanniest

2006-10-29T11:07:00.000+09:00

The turd, the cholecystectomy and the gross injustice

2006-10-27T16:19:00.000+09:00

Imagine a turd on a white slab of rock in the blistering sun somewhere far from civilisation. The turd is a little crisp from the heat, and has a bootprint in it. One of God’s bootprints.

I was that turd once. What I mean is, I was a house officer for a year. A house officer, or intern in America, is a doctor stuck in no-man’s-land between the Scylla of medical school and the Charybdis of a fully-fledged medical career. The problem is that it’s a no-man’s-land seeded with landmines. I know those metaphors are a little mixed but I’m very upset by this story, and it’s my blog anyway, damn your eyes.

As a house officer you’re the doctors’ skivvy and much of the time the nurses’ as well. There is no task so demeaning but that it won’t dribble down and splash in your eye eventually. From picking up the consultant’s dry cleaning to scratching his balls for him while his hands are full, from disimpacting bowels to being called upon to relieve the junior nurses’ sexual tension, yes, it’s old muggins to the fore. Okay, I lied a bit there.

Half of that year I spent on a surgical unit at a large teaching hospital. My consultant was called Mr Fry. He had big knuckly hands and a big face and big hair coming out of his nose. Despite this he was regarded as a little man as he was only five feet two inches tall without the platform shoes he usually sported. He barely looked me in the eye while I was there, and not because he was shorter than me. He never called me by my name either. Instead he would make up names for me: ‘Hey you,’ sometimes, or ‘You there,’ or, as he got to know me, ‘You fucking arsehole.’ There were six of us house officers on the unit and I don’t really think I had a harder time from him than any of the others did, but then again this story isn’t about them. Chris, Rebecca and the rest of you, if you’re reading this, sorry, mates, but it was every man for himself and you know it.

One afternoon I was scurrying around the wards, trying to catch up with various duties so that I could leave at a reasonable time after spending the previous night on call and getting three hours’ sleep. One of the sisters mentioned that Mr Fry was about to start a cholecystectomy.

‘I’d better lie low, then, before I get roped in to assist,’ I laughed.

‘Funny you should say that,’ she smirked.

Half an hour later I was scrubbed up and in the theatre. I’d tried to palm off the job of assisting, of course. My first choice was one of the four medical students attached to our team but they’d all buggered off to ‘lectures’ or something. Probably just left early to go and get drunk and do drugs and have sex, the workshy little bastards. Next I tried Keith, the Australian junior surgeon who was over on an exchange programme. He tore himself away from admiring his blonde surfer’s looks in the mirror above the sink to grin and say ‘Dilligaf, mate,’ before disappearing amidst a bevy of cooing student nurses. I used to think Dilligaf was the name of the Aussie town he was from until he explained that it was an acronym for do I look like I give a fuck.

So, all my hopes of getting away on time having shrivelled like an old man’s todger during a bed bath in January, I gowned up and pushed open the doors of the theatre. The patient was already on the table, anaesthetised and draped and having his exposed abdomen painted with disinfectant by one of the theatre nurses. Another nurse was tying Mr Fry’s mask behind his head for him. He didn’t look in my direction but muttered, ‘About fucking time.’

We got to work. When I say ‘we’, I just stood there and did what Mr Fry told me. You learn it as the golden rule when you start assisting in theatre: never contribute an opinion, never do anything that you’re not explicitly asked to. So I pulled on a retractor to hold the flaps of the patient’s abdomen apart while Fry rummaged, which wasn’t easy because as luck would have it the patient was clearly a fitness freak and had abdominal muscles like the halves of a mantrap which kept trying to spring back together again. Helping Fry was his registrar, a trainee surgeon called Dave who was one of the most miserable bastards I’d ever met and looked like Freddie Mercury – yes, I know those statements sit oddly together – and also in the theatre were two nurses and the anaesthetist, who sat on his customary stool looking utterly bored and reading what could possibly have been a skin mag. Unlike many surgeons who hold forth during surgery on such riveting topics as golf and the price of the new model Jaguar, Mr Fry doesn’t go in for small talk, and the only sounds were the steady beep of the anaesthetic machine, the hiss and gurgle of the suction apparatus which Dave used periodically to clear the wound space of fluid, and Fry’s intermittent mutterings of ‘fuck,’ ‘shit,’ and, in a rare venture into polysyllaby, ‘fucking wankers’.

Things started to go a bit wrong. The patient was a fit man in his mid-forties but for some reason his blood pressure started doing strange things, rising and then dropping. The anaesthetist was perturbed enough to reach out and turn some dials on his machine. Mr Fry glared at him and snarled, ‘I need more fucking muscle relaxant. It’s tighter than a dog’s arsehole in here.’ (The anaesthetist is responsible for keeping the patient’s muscles in a state of sufficient flaccidity for the surgeons to work with ease.) The tension in the room rose noticeably. We were all waiting for something to trigger one of Fry’s legendary rages. Usually what happened at times like this was that someone dropped a clanger – literally, by knocking some bowl or instrument to the ground.

Instead, there came the sound of air being gradually released through the pinched neck of an inflated balloon, starting as a mosquito-like whine and dropping in pitch before climaxing in a rubbery noise of alarming moistness. An instant later the foetid stench of bowel gas cut through the ambient smells of the theatre. I would have thought Mr Fry or Dave had accidentally cut into the patient’s colon if it hadn’t been for the preceding noise.

You could have heard a swab drop. Mr Fry raised his head and, looking at no-one in particular, said: ‘Who the fuck was that?’

We glanced at each other over our face masks: Dave, the two theatre nurses, the anaesthetist and I. Slowly Fry let his gaze fall on each of us in turn.

The noise came again, fainter this time but unmistakable. Our eyes darted from one to another like escaped ferrets.

‘For Christ’s sake, which of you fucking pigs is it?’

We shuffled in our theatre shoes, saying nothing. I knew he was going to pick on me, just knew it, and sure enough, when I looked up he was staring at me.

‘Do you want to do this operation yourself?’ he screamed.

I said nothing.

‘Seriously, do you want to give it a try? While I stand off to the side fucking poisoning you?’

‘It wasn’t me,’ I muttered.

‘Like fuck,’ he shouted, and turned back to the business at hand.

The rest of the procedure passed without incident. Afterwards in the scrub room I flung off my gloves and gown and stomped out into the corridor.

I was getting into the lift when as luck would have it Mr Fry leapt in just before the doors closed. We were the only ones in the lift and we dropped three floors in silence. One floor above mine it stopped for him and he said, ‘Never, ever fucking contradict me in front of other people again,’ and stepped out.

Leaving the faintest whine in his wake, and the lingering smell of bowel gas.

The Drugstore Comic Book Incident (epilog)

2006-10-21T21:15:00.000+09:00

Yes, we really do spell it like that in America.

Kim Ayres and Dr Achilles ‘Ack’ Maroon were found guilty on multiple counts of murder, kidnapping, amputation, robbery and gross bad taste, and were sentenced to serve fifteen life sentences each in Alcatraz. Maroon made an abortive attempt to escape after a year by secretly building a jet engine out of scraps from the prison’s metalwork shop. Ayres became a born-again Christian and eventually ran his own televangelist TV network from his cell.

Joe K’Mayall decided to leave his drifting days behind him and pursue a career teaching sign language to deaf kids. Last I heard, he wasn’t doing so well work-wise.

Gorilla Bananas was fished out of the river after two days, hypothermic but alive. He was given the freedom of the city in recognition of his contribution to apprehending the perps, and rumors are he’s going to run for mayor. El Barbudo was never found.

Oh, and my Pussy was found entangled in the gorilla’s fur and returned to me. Wet, hairy and smelling of fish, she worked fine.

Sam Bride and I keep in contact. She’s considering being Bananas’s campaign manager. The law which (quite rightly) forbids romance across the species barrier means that the affection between them has to be restrained, but they’re still good friends. And if first thing in the morning she sometimes carries the faint but unmistakable scent of gorilla, why, it’s none of my business.

Sarah Laughs was sentenced to ten years for her part in the conspiracy, but McShae decided he still loved her and hijacked the van that was transporting her to gaol after her trial. I don’t know where exactly they are now, but the other day I got a blank postcard from somewhere south of the Rio Grande, and attached to it was a generous check. It bounced, of course.

Philip Challinor went on to become head of the FBI, but, frustrated by that agency’s exclusively domestic role, he switched to the CIA. We exchange cards every time he topples the government of a small Latin American country.

SafeT quit dressing up as a trash can and went for the leafy vegetable look instead. Now, if I want information, I have to visit the greengrocers and supermarkets to find him.

Fat Mammy Cat got five years for aiding and abetting but was released after six months as the prison governor and all the warders were too scared of her to keep her there.

Old Knudsen I had assumed perished in the fire, but a couple of years later I was real depressed one night and called up the Samaritans and there was his voice on the line. I’ve never been depressed since then.

And yours truly?

Well, the morning after the events of that night I woke up with crushing, vice-like chest pains that radiated down my arm. I got to the phone in time and was rushed to hospital where I underwent emergency quadruple heart bypass surgery followed by a month in intensive care. My doctor pronounced himself baffled by this turn of events and said that I was one of the healthiest people he knew. We were in his office six weeks later, sampling the brandy and Monte Cristo cigars I’d bought him as a thank-you gift. He concluded that there were some mysteries medical science just wasn’t up to answering, even in 1949, and he advised me to avoid stress and to include more lard in my diet.

A couple days ago I was sitting alone in my office well after midnight, drinking and smoking and thinking about how the human heart was just a fleshy shell with a void inside it. I picked up the paper and read the funny pages and then my horoscope. It said to avoid straining because Cancer is creeping into Uranus. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair.

Then I noticed an envelope on the floor by the door. I must have left it there when I picked up the mail. I couldn’t read the postmark.

Inside the envelope was this drawing:

and a clump of coarse, curly hair.

Like from a buffalo's crotch.

Or a beard.

I sighed.

And I lit a cigarette.

THE END

Fifty-one essential things

2006-10-20T08:18:00.000+09:00

I’ve realised recently that I’ve been missing the fundamental point of maintaining a weblog. It’s supposed to be about one’s self, isn’t that right? Lots of you have meme-type entries on your own sites in which you list assorted facts about yourselves. A couple of you have emailed begging for more details about me, the man behind the mask; so herewith are 51 interesting and important things about me. That’s me, as in Foot Eater, as in I.

1. I was born in South-East London, but if you tell anyone I will find you and hurt you, and that's a promise.
2. I have some Welsh in me. I had some Scots in me too until they arrested Mr McTavish.
3. I have a third nipple which fortunately is hidden behind my ear.
4. My parents were liberal enough to let me play with dangerous toys like knives and chainsaws. In fact they positively encouraged it.
5. I spent a lot of my early years playing on motorways.
6. My first pet was called Roadkill and I peeled it off the M25 near the Chertsey exit.
7. I’ve always had a very good memory.
8. When my pet kitten Spike died, my father made a little coffin for him and a little hearse for me to pull him around in.
9. I still have both in my attic to this day.
10. When my pet budgerigar Violet died, we had to cut open two of our cats to find her.
11. I was so upset at her death that my father built a little jetpack for her to make her fly again, but it didn’t work.
12. My fingernails are getting a little long.
13. My father is in prison doing ten years for the irresponsible use of spoons.
14. When I was a child I created an imaginary world filled with fantasy friends and I used to spend most of my waking moments there.
15. Thanks to the wonders of blogging I have rediscovered this world thirty years later.
16. I have a habit of laughing during funerals.
17. At Easter the egg hunt at our house was made more challenging by my parents’ throwing the eggs into the sea.
18. My favourite music is tonal in character but can be of any genre as long as it has that certain je ne sais quois. You can keep your pretentious rubbish.
19. My favourite song lyric is this, from The Gift by The Velvet Underground: ‘Then she sank down to her knees, grasped the cutter by both hands, took a deep breath and plunged the long blade/ Through the middle of the package, through the middle of the masking tape, through the card-board/ Through the cushioning and (thud) right through the center of Waldo Jeffers’s head, which split slightly and caused/ Rhythmic arcs of red to pulsate gently in the morning sun...’
20. I lost my virginity at an early age but I seem to have found it again.
21. The most unusual place I have ever had sex is in a woman’s arms.
22. I never went in for doggy-style until I learned that it didn’t necessarily involve howling for hours until the neighbours turned the hose on you at three a.m.
23. As a teenager I dropped acid once and burned off three of my toes.
24. I've never tried illicit drugs, though once I swallowed an enema and ended up shitfaced.
25. I just saw a leaf fall from a tree in the garden.
26. I've experimented with fisting but I decided it wasn’t my sort of thing after barely a year.
27. My memory is excellent.
28. I’ve started to write a book of proverbs I have thought up myself. The only entry so far is a son of a bitch should be made to sleep in a kennel.
29. My next writing project is a Muslim version of The Da Vinci Code.
30. Sometimes I like to sit and contemplate infinity until my nose bleeds, before going to work in the morning.
31. I solved the Boolean problem seconds before reading the answer on Dr Maroon’s site.
32. Since the age of 13 I have had curious unexplained blisters on the palm of my dominant hand.
33. I successfully resisted family pressure to follow my older brother into business, but have lived in the shadow of his achievements ever since.
34. I have one older brother who is the premier crack dealer in Billericay.
35. I have one sister who is dead and lives in Cardiff.
36. I’ve just noticed some dust on the mantelpiece.
37. My mother lost her life in an unfortunate spooning accident.
38. My biggest ambition is to own a rocket launcher.
39. I am a committed citizen of Great Britain and I despise people who refuse to exercise their right to vote.
40. I stamp my individuality on the voting process by putting a tick next to my candidate of choice and crosses next to all the others.
41. I’m allergic to seafood – it gives me nightmares, and I wake up with bad breath and pubic hairs between my teeth.
42. I have a very good memory.
43. If I can’t have a rocket launcher then I’d settle for an Uzi.
44. Hurricanes depress me.
45. I snigger whenever I hear the title of Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl.
46. I have a morbid fear of Punch and Judy.
47. I don’t like Richard and Judy much either.
48. I’m told I’m very immature.
49. I have worked as a grave digger, a corpse mechanic and a park attendant.
50. I like to eat After Eight mints at 19h55 and point this out to everybody around me.
51. I’m convinced that if I stare at my navel long enough I’ll discover the ultimate secret of existence.

Update!

SafeTinspector is absolutely right. Please replace the current number 25 with this:

25. When Petal, my Rottweiler, died, I was so upset that my father took a course in taxidermy and in the nick of time stuffed her corpse and mounted her on castors. I stopped taking her with me when I got to high school because there were a lot of stairs.

Update !

SafeT is right again. Please replace the current number 12 with this:

12. When my pet goldfish Colin died, my father purchased a huge aquarium and swam around in it painted orange and using an aqualung. My first wife left me because of this.

The Drugstore Comic Book Incident (VII) (ii)

2006-10-18T02:41:00.000+09:00

The finale.

The gorilla towered over me, his breath so overpoweringly fetid I wondered briefly which end of him I was facing. Not for the first time my life tried to flash before my eyes, but this time it was tired, monochrome, a wind blowing tumbleweeds down the back alleys of a dead-end one-horse town.

As the ape raised his great hands and clasped them in preparation for the killing blow, I became aware of little details: El Barbudo’s high-pitched snickering like an Italian castrato, the chanting of the crowd, Dr Maroon slipping a piece of gum into his mouth and lifting the lid of a trash can to dispose of the wrapper – hang on, that trash can wasn’t there before…

Several things happened at once then.

An arm sprouted from the trash can and grabbed Maroon’s wrist and twisted his gun free, and beneath the lid I saw the face of SafeT, my stool pigeon.

Through the vents in the ceiling dropped floor-length ropes and people began to shimmy down them, commando-style.

The doors thru which I had been brought in heaved open and more people ran in, as did a small blue terrier, yapping ferociously. Monstee!

The gorilla stopped, arms poised above his head, as startled as the rest of us.

There were a dozen or so of them. Sam Bride led; alongside her were assorted denizens of the night who I’d encountered over the years and, critically, done favors for (or possessed blackmail material about). They included SafeT, naturally, and that chainsaw-wielding dinosaur hater from Bo Khaki’s, and the arm-wrestling broad from Boston, and that other dame from Frisco with the poison-tipped stilettoes.

The tableau held for a few seconds, and then battle commenced.

Monstee ran straight for Glark, the wolf hound, and with a sound like a ripe pear being punctured sank her teeth into his family jewels. Mr Dinosaur Hater revved his chainsaw into life and set about him. Sam put away her Browning as Fat Mammy Cat rocketed toward her. It was going to be hand to hand. Cat was well known as an expert in the deadly Chinese martial art of Fah Kyu, and as she aimed a slap upside Sam’s head I winced. But the speed with which Sam blocked it and retaliated with an even harder slap upside Cat’s head made me realise that Sam was skilled in the even deadlier art of Fah Kyu Too.

I weighed in with my fists, giving Ayres’s minions the same rough treatment I’d received as a kid growing up in the docklands of Hell’s Toilet. It was harsh, and it was ugly. A group of them attacked me with heavy wooden sticks. After sustained attempts on their part to force me to submit to their huge poles, I finally beat them all off.

But we were outnumbered and outgunned, and as I planted my steel toecap in yet another crotch, I noticed that my would-be rescuers were all either flagging or captive. Poor Joe K’Mayall had gotten his other hand cut off during the struggle. Before long we were surrounded by guns and stood huddled together. Thru all of this the gorilla had stood frowning, befuddled by the drugs they’d given him.

‘How did you find me?’ I asked Sam.

‘A little bird told me,’ she murmured. Quickly she explained that her trained sniffer sparrow – the one I’d met in my cell - had led her and her posse here. I gave her a smile. I’d been wanting to give her one ever since I’d met her.

I glared up at Ayres and Barbudo grinning smugly atop their pyramid. Ah, well, at least we gave those G-d-damn Southern hicks a taste of Yankee spunk.

Maroon looked up at them enquiringly. Ayres held out his fists, both thumbs pointing downward. Around us the safety catches were eased back.

This was it, then.

Except maybe we had one chance.

‘Guys,’ I called out to no-one in particular, ‘how do you circumcize a whale?’

Silence.

‘With four skin divers.’

It was the worst joke I’d ever told. I prayed it would do the trick.

Barbudo snarled with contempt. ‘G-d damn it, Pappy! It’s amazin’ t’ think we descended from the apes an’ not the other way round!’

Slowly the gorilla raised his head and stared at Barbudo. Then, with a noise like lava rumbling up from the bowels of the earth, he drew himself up to his full awesome height and let out a roar that drowned out all thought for a few seconds. With a violent jerk of his leg he broke free of the chain that was holding him in place.

It worked! I’d managed to goad Barbudo into displaying his ignorance of basic hominid evolutionary principles and committing a faux pas that to an intelligent gorilla’s ears would have been a grievous insult. (Humans are of course not descended from gorillas, or from chimps either; rather, we share a common ancestor.)

As the gorilla began to thunder his way over and Barbudo started to blubber and squeal, I took the cigarette from my mouth and tossed it onto the pyramid, which you’ll recall was made of comic books. All eyes were on the approaching ape and so nobody else noticed the blaze until it was well underway.

The room erupted. The gorilla reached the pyramid and lashed at it with his ham fists, knocking burning comic books flying. Ayres slid on his tush to the ground and scrambled away. Barbudo tried to do the same as the gorilla grabbed for him. He would have made it if it hadn’t been for his beard, which the ape seized and used to draw him closer. I knew we had to get out of there but I couldn’t help watching for a moment. The gorilla’s hair had caught fire but he ignored it and, clutching the screaming Barbudo under one arm, began to climb one of the steel ladders to the aperture in the ceiling above.

‘No!’ yelled Ayres. ‘The warehouse is above us! The comic books will all go up!’

I grabbed Sam and a dazed-looking McShae and beckoned to SafeT and, Monstee ahead, we ran for the doors. Around us people were burning, screaming, trying to get out. Thru the doors we raced down corridor after corridor, seeking a random path out before the warehouse above us collapsed in a storm of burning timber and buried us. Eventually we reached a dead end. I lit a cigarette.

‘Up there!’ said McShae, pointing at a child-sized hole in the wall some eight feet above us.

McShae bent over and one by one we mounted him and entered his hole. I pulled him up after us and we crawled awkwardly along a seemingly endless tunnel until fresh air breathed on us from ahead. In a minute we were tumbling out on to a grassy bank up river from the warehouse.

I got up and looked back. It was night-time and against the black sky the warehouse was ablaze, millions of dollars of evil smut in the form of comic books going up in smoke. Already the sirens were sounding in the distance. Between the warehouse and the river was a crane and I could make out a figure climbing up its side. It was Bananas the gorilla, still on fire and still holding on to the tiny struggling shape of Barbudo. The pair reached the top of the crane and the gorilla stood there, beating his chest and letting out a bloodcurdling bellow of anger. Beside me Sam gasped as the crane began to topple sideways and, before it hit the ground, Bananas and Barbudo were flung into the murky iciness of the river.

I cursed. Barbudo still had his hands on my Pussy.

*

We stood, Sam Bride and me, in the organized chaos of flashing lights and ambulance crews and police and I smoked a cigarette and sucked on a bottle of JD. McShae had been carted off to hospital with delayed shock, but not before I’d gotten him to promise me a check for rescuing him since Laughs wasn’t going to be paying me now. SafeT too was under the medics, having suffered minor burns when the trashcan he was dressed in had heated up.

Lieutenant O’Nann came up to us. ‘We got Ayres and Maroon in custody, along with most of the others who didn’t die in the fire. Barbudo we’re presuming drowned.’

I said nothing, just looked out over the river and thought of blackness and cold razor steel and the oblivion of the bottle.

After a minute O’Nann said gruffly: ‘You done good, Eater. The city’s in your debt.’

He held out his hand but I didn’t shake it; it had just been in his pocket.

I poured some JD into a saucer for Monstee and lit her a smoke. In a while I reached into my pocket and said to Sam, ‘I got this for you. For saving me. And because -’

She looked down at the ring, then smiled sadly at me. ‘Thank you, Mr Eater,’ she said. ‘But my heart belongs to another.’ And she gazed out at the river, where the gorilla had disappeared.

I put the box away. Ah well, it was probably for the best. The last time I got a dame to put her finger in my ring it had gotten painful.

‘I would like to give you some jewelry, though,’ I said. ‘As a keepsake.’

She smiled acceptance.

So I gave her a brooch.

You thought I was going to say ‘pearl necklace’, didn’t you?

Is that it?! What about all the loose ends?

He’s probably got an epilogue up his sleeve.

If so, he’d better get on with it.

Does anyone fancy a pint?

Ego Wars

2006-10-16T02:21:00.000+09:00

Who’s got the biggest ego in the blogosphere? I’m not including all those big political blogs, which are run by lizard-like beings and not humans anyway, but am referring rather to ‘our corner’. ‘Our Corner’ is a somewhat ill-defined term given that we all move in slightly different blog circles and have different links, but nevertheless…

I hereby announce the opening of nominations for the 2006 Cock of Narcissus Awards. Narcissus was of course the most narcissistic person in history, and how better to symbolise rampant self-obsession than with a crowing fowl standing erect. So send me your choices of the three most up-their-own-arse bloggers, in order, and I’ll collate the results and publish them when I get a moment in my busy and important life to attend to such trivia.

Remember, I’m not looking for the funniest, most self-actualised or most self-confident blogger – that would be me, of course – but for the person whose swollen sense of self-importance is such that David Hasselhoff is made to look like a dilettante by comparison. (Look up that word if you don’t know it; it’s not my fault you can’t speak French like me.) I’m aware that this exercise might lead to cases of shattered self-esteem, threats of violence, and a bitterness that could echo down the generations (as did the first annual Blunt Cogs Smug Awards, which I won as Best Character); but to achieve this will require an effort on the part of all of us.

You can post your choices in the comments, or email me. Confidentiality is guaranteed subject to my discretion.

Uncannier

2006-10-12T01:51:00.000+09:00

The Drugstore Comic Book Incident (VII) (i)

2006-10-10T16:21:00.000+09:00

The first part of part seven of seven in a thrilling new hardboiled noir serial.

Maroon’s breath on the back of my neck smelled like haddock as I stumbled forward. Far ahead was the echo of voices. After what seemed like forever the twists and turns of the passages led to a pair of oak double doors straight in front of us. One of the goons pushed past me and knocked.

‘Come in,’ called a voice that was as Southern as deep-fried turkey. A steel skeleton claw of pure frosty fright clamped itself around my unmentionables. I knew that voice.

The doors groaned open and we were shoved inside. I blinked in the bright artificial lighting. It was an enormous room, with ten or more doors leading off along all sides. Great steel ladders reached up to apertures in the ceiling, thru which air was blowing. It was some kind of giant basement or cellar.

I was in trouble, more trouble than I’d been in since I was a kid and my mom came home to find me energetically beating the bishop on the front lawn. It wasn’t my fault the clergy were so lousy at croquet.

There were around thirty people in the room. At the centre was a huge pyramid, ten feet high, formed from what I came to recognise as comic books. On top of the pyramid were two crude thrones made of wicker and Scottish tape. And seated on the thrones, bearded and grinning, were two people whose faces I’d prayed never to see again.

Kim Ayres and El Barbudo.

The rest of the people in the room milled around the base of the pyramid, standing guard, playing cards or whatever. Ayres and Barbudo didn’t acknowledge my presence at first; they were playing with money, great fistfuls of it, throwing it in the air like confetti and giggling like kids. Ayres tossed a wad of notes held together by a clip high in the air and put a bullet thru it with a Webley he’d drawn from his pocket. Barbudo laughed at this and joined in, producing a Tommy gun and hurling packets of cash ever further to see if they could hit them. Barbudo won, shooting his wad all the way across the room.

At last they tired of this sport and muttered to each other, pointing at me and Joe K’Mayall. One of their retinue came forward. I recognised him; he worked at the same sleazy nightclub as Knudsen. He was dressed in a rabbit costume and eating a very big carrot. He appeared – how can I put this? - he appeared to have a very big carrot down the front of his pants too.

‘Nyaaah, what’s up, Doc?’ he said to Maroon.

‘Package for Mr and Mr Cosifantutti,’ Maroon growled. His growl was returned and I noticed a large, wolf-like dog curled up at the base of the pyramid.

‘Eater!’ crowed Ayres. ‘Long time no see.’ It was his voice I’d heard thru the door. He was from Kenbraskansas and it showed in his accent and in his fondness for raw swampfish.

‘Kin ah killum now, Pappy? Kin ah? Kin ah?’ jabbered Barbudo, spittle spraying between the gaps in his front teeth and his wall-eyedness more pronounced than ever.

‘Hush, Junior.’

Pappy? Junior? ‘I thought you two were cousins,’ I said.

‘That, too,’ said Ayres.

Now Ayres and Barbudo are apt to use some mighty ripe language, and so rather than clutter up the text with dashes to censor all the curse words, from now on I’m going to use ‘flip’ and ‘shoot’ as substitutes for… well, I guess if you’re a man you’ll know the words I mean, and if you’re a dame, you won’t and you’ve not got no business knowing neither.

‘So what’s your game, Ayres?’ I asked. ‘The kidnappings, the hand amputations, the comic books, the Mafia business?’

‘Shoot, Eater, you always was a flippin’ nosy flipper,’ he spat. ‘But flip it, I might as well tell you.’ He pulled a mandolin from somewhere and began to pluck at it absently as he spoke. I never knew he played; he’d never mentioned it before.

‘El here and I are AKA Linguini and Ravioli Cosifantutti. We set this Mafia front up so the cops and the flippin’ Feds wouldn’t take us seriously and would leave us alone. Our business was wicker until recently. Still is, but the real money is in comic books. Eater, you’ve no flippin’ idea how much the underground comic book industry has taken off since you were involved. Every street in this city has its comic book junkies. Soon every household in America will. Back in your day we sold thru specialist outlets. Now we’re expanding to drugstores. Where kids go.’

‘You inhuman bounder!’ I yelled. I didn’t really yell that but I can’t print what I did yell, and this sounds kind of British and cool.

‘Flippin’ shuddup, you flippin’ shooter!’ shrieked Barbudo, spraying a burst from the end of his Tommy into the air. Ayres flipped him fondly under the chin.

‘But Pappy,’ said Barbudo, almost in tears, ‘there’s no nat’ralness to any of his comments or responses.’

Ayres continued. ‘With an increase in the market, there’s an increasing demand for harder, more realistic stuff. All those pictures you posed for, that’s so tame, so 1930s. And so we hit on the most brilliant flippin’ idea ever. Photorealism. You take a photo and get an artist to draw over it on tracing paper. The result: a super-realistic comic book.’

It made sense now. That was why they were kidnapping people, chopping their hands and feet off, shopping for individual body parts. They needed photos for their sick, violent strips. I needed a drink. JD, preferably, but Scottish would do.

‘Where’s my client, McShae?’ I asked. I feared the worst.

Ayres chuckled. ‘Right here.’ He made a movement with his hand. Two of his people went over to a door. I recognized one of them as the kick-boxing dame from Bo Khaki’s bar. Fat Mammy Cat, I think she was called. They emerged with a haggard-looking figure between them. McShae.

‘Hello, Foots,’ he said weakly. ‘You’ve aged.’

‘He was a real flippin’ catch,’ said Ayres. ‘He’s the best artist we knew, so he gives us a real edge over the competition. He refused to join us willingly, so we’ve had to use coercion. Also, he was bait to trap you, Eater.’

Something was nagging at a corner of my brain. The female voice on the phone just before Maroon had coshed me... As if she could read my thoughts, a woman stepped forward from the shadows. It was Sarah Laughs, and laugh she did.

It had been a set-up from the start. She’d sold her hubby to these guys and then had ‘hired’ me to lead me straight into the trap. Damn. I knew I should’ve expected a femme fatale somewhere along the line.

‘Why me?’ I asked.

‘Because, motherflipper,’ said Ayres, ‘you always died so well in the original Blunt Cogs strips, we wanted to capture your actual death on camera. Shoot, it’ll be our best selling issue ever, especially when it’s drawn by McShae.’

I was going to be glarked. Glarking meant decapitation, usually by ax, and El Barbudo had named it that after his dog Glark, who lay slavering now at the base of the pyramid. Rumor had it that Barbudo had such a fetish about decapitation because he was embarrassed about being such a redneck, and wanted to turn everybody else into one as well.

‘One last request,’ I said.

‘Smoke? Sure,’ said Ayres, and an attendant brought a package. I lit up three at the same time.

‘That wasn’t what I was going to ask for,’ I said between sucks. ‘Let it be anyone but Barbudo. I deserve better than that.’

‘J-s-s Chr-st! Flip!’ El Barbudo ejaculated. ‘Pappy, tell him to stop running away from who he is!’

That got me riled. Cussing I can deal with, but not the taking of our Lord’s name in vain. I’d also noticed that he had my Pussy tucked into his belt.

‘As it happens, Eater,’ said Ayres, ‘we’ve got something more spectacular lined up for your demise.’

He snapped his fingers and a large slab of the wall began to descend with a grinding, moaning noise. Blackness yawned beyond. And then there was a collective intake of breath as a huge figure shambled out. It was Bananas, the giant gorilla kidnapped from the city’s zoo. His one leg was manacled and from this a chain stretched back into his cell, so that he stopped short before he could reach the pyramid. His eyes were red and bewildered as though he’d been drugged. Even from where I was I could smell the wicker they’d doped him with.

A couple of goons had already set up the camera to one side, and now I felt gun barrels in my back, prodding me forward. The people in the room had formed a semi-circle and were beginning a rhythmic chant of glark, glark. The gorilla fixed his gaze on me and life flickered there in his eye. Life, and hate.

Behind me, Maroon hissed: ‘One is a phony buck!’

I lit a cigarette.

Having your head pulled off by a giant gorilla or being shot in the back – it’s not much of a choice, is it!

Just finish the damn thing, will you.

The double entendres are wearing a bit thin, aren’t they?

Where can I get a handsome calfskin-bound collector’s edition of this story?

Memo

2006-10-07T01:45:00.000+09:00

Dear Mr Eater

Ref: your manuscript, The Drugstore Comic Book Incident

Thank you for furnishing us with the sixth instalment of your serial (more properly the seventh, as the episode titled Interlude is really an instalment in itself, as I suspect you well know). My colleagues and I feel we should remind you of certain conditions with which it is essential for you to comply if we are to publish the final instalment and indeed if we are even to consider publication of the entire story in book format.

1. Your contract specifies that you will include no more than three (3) jokes of a crude and/or sexual and/or scatological nature per instalment. In the sixth and most recent episode, we counted four (4) such jokes. Please note that we have drawn your attention to earlier violations of this contractual stipulation. Your response on those occasions, namely that ‘they’re the only thing people read the story for,’ was and continues to be unacceptable. Furthermore, the jokes have of late suggested an unusually high degree of fixation on the male masturbatory act. Please refer to our pamphlet, Guidance to Authors, specifically the sections titled ‘Variety - The Spice of Life’ and ‘The Pen, Not the Penis – Wholesome Solutions to Writer’s Block’.

2. The latest instalment contains a disquietingly large number of crass national stereotypes which could prove problematic from a marketing and indeed legal point of view. Please refer to the enclosed photocopy of the relevant section of the Race Relations Act (1975). We ask that you avoid such xenophobic caricaturing in the next episode. Also, please see our last memo as regards the correct use of ‘Scotch’ and ‘Scottish’.

3. Without wanting to cast doubt on your authorial skills, we must nevertheless express our concerns about the number of disparate plot strands and details that have been left unresolved or unexplained in your story thus far. It appears to us unlikely that you will be able to tie up these strands to the reader’s satisfaction in the one remaining episode, given your hitherto rather flexible approach to the concept of plotting. Please consider this carefully.

4. My colleagues and I are quite willing to engage in lively debate about matters of mutual interest with our clients, and indeed welcome such discussion as a healthy element in the artistic process. That said, your response to our memo to you last week is to our minds unacceptable. We feel strongly that your returning the letter with ‘You cornholing sons of bitches’ and ‘Bite me’ scrawled across it was inappropriate and unhelpful. Kindly desist from similar behaviour in the future.

Yours sincerely,

C. Gaylord Ramsbottom
Editor-in-Chief

The Drugstore Comic Book Incident (VI)

2006-10-04T01:59:00.000+09:00

Part six of seven in a thrilling new hardboiled noir serial.

My head jerked up as the sting of ice water arced across my face. I was on my hands and knees and must have been dozing. I was secured to the wall by a manacle clamped round my neck and attached to a three foot length of chain.

It was a ten foot square cube of a cell with damp walls and no windows and a single electric bulb hanging from a piece of flex in the ceiling. The light was always on, day and night, not that I could tell the difference. I had no idea how long I’d been down here. I’d woken up here, my head aching. I hadn’t seen Maroon since but I’d glimpsed him behind me in the moment before the blow to my head. I’d been set up. The woman with the naggingly familiar voice had kept me talking on the phone while Maroon had snuck up behind me.

There was some sort of air vent in the wall to my left and an old wooden door in the wall opposite me. Twice since I’d been here a man had come through the door. He was little, old and Italian by the look of it: greased down shiny black hair, a pencil mustache, a tendency to contextless hand gestures, and with a funny accent when he spoke, which he seldom did. Both times he’d come in to feed me, dropping a bowl of stuff that looked like congealed pond scum at my feet. It tasted like something you’d wring out of a dead wino’s underwear, but I ate it anyhow. I needed the protein.

Both times the little old man had been carrying an enormous shotgun, and he was carrying it now. From his other hand dangled a bucket with which he’d just doused me.

‘You-a wake-a up-a now-a,’ he said rudely. He wasn’t close enough that I could make a move on him but he was close enough that I could smell the garlic, and the wicker too. He pulled a towel out of his pocket and threw it at me, then disappeared out the door again. I wiped my face.

I blinked. To my left was a pair of beautiful, plump tits.

Except they weren’t tits, they were sparrows, and there was just one of them. I’d been there so long I was starting to see double. It was a female, and it must have flown in accidentally through the air vent, on the rim of which it now perched. Pity. I could have done with a carrier pigeon.

The door opened again and the old man tottered back in, lugging a camera and tripod as well as his gun. He deposited the bundle on the floor and started to set up the equipment. He was sweating from the exertion, and I noticed that his mustache was peeling off, as was the toupee he was wearing.

‘I know you,’ I said.

‘You-a no-a talk-a,’ he snarled, in an accent I now recognized as incorporating elements of Scotch.

The toupee flopped off entirely to reveal a bald, gnarled, liver-spotted pate. It was Knudsen. He worked at the Glory Hallelujah Hole, the most decadent nightclub in town. I was there once on a case and they had this jazz band, except what they were playing wasn’t jazz. They all had long hair and weird guitars that were plugged into the wall and which they ritually smashed at the end of thir performances. One of the players was even wearing a schoolboy’s uniform. The Anachronisms, I believe they called themselves.

‘How’s it hanging, Knudsen?’ I asked, chuckling at my wit. Knudsen worked as a stripper and table dancer at the club. Like I said, it’s a sordid joint.

He glared at me, then laughed nastily. ‘Och aye the noo, ah suppose there’s nae point in keeping up thae pretence any longer, seeing how yoo’re nae gonna leave heer alive anyhoo.’ He crouched under the cloth hood, checking the light settings but levelling the gun at me at the same time.

‘In that case you might as well tell me what’s going on here,’ I said. ‘Why are you trying to pass yourself off as an Italian?’

‘Hoots mon, thae Mafia thing is just a front,’ he said cryptically.

‘And why are you taking a photo of me?’

‘That’s enough exposition for noo, laddie,’ he said. He jacked a shell into the breech of the shotgun.

The fat little sparrow rose shrieking into the air, startled by the noise. Knudsen glanced up at it just as it was directly above him, and it unloaded a great runny stream of white and yellow ordure into his face.

He gave a roar and stumbled forward, blinded. I grabbed at him, the restraining chain round my neck pulled taut, and got a hold of the barrel of his shotgun. I tugged harder and harder on his enormous weapon and it discharged against the ceiling. He faltered, disoriented by the noise of the blast, and I punched his lights out.

*

He had the key to the manacle in his pocket and I freed myself and took the shotgun (though I would have preferred Pussy) and locked him in the room. I had to move fast because the sound of the blast was bound to alert somebody. Thru the door was a corridor running left and right. From somewhere in the building came a drawn-out scream. If my blood was warm it would have curdled.

The sparrow was flying down the corridor and I figured it had some instinct for the way out so I followed. It felt like I was underground. Doors led off from the passage and there were small windows in some of them. Despite myself I stopped and peered into one of them, curious.

A red-haired young man was strapped on his back on a table. Two men stood over him, one of them anonymous-looking and operating a camera on a tripod, the other poised with an enormous butcher’s cleaver in his hand, about to bring it down. I fired thru the window. The blast caught the camera man in the back and flung him against the wall. I kicked open the door and started to reload but the guy with the cleaver was swinging it down and I brought my hand up instinctively and grabbed his fist. With expert rhythmic movements of my wrist I worked at his huge chopper until I achieved its release. I threw it in a corner and prodded him with the shotgun.

He was ruddy-faced with tiny round glasses and dressed in shiny black boots and lederhosen with a sausage sticking out of his pocket. ‘Gott in Himmel! Achtung! Schweinhund! Raus! Schnell! Scheisse!’ he shouted.

The guy strapped to the table said weakly, ‘I think he’s trying to be Italian, but he hasn’t quite got the hang of it.’

I undid the guy’s straps and he sat up and rubbed his wrists. For the first time I noticed that his left hand was missing and the stump bandaged. He told me his name was Joe K’Mayall, the kid Sam Bride was looking for. He’d got mixed up in the seamy wicker underworld and had gone to the Wicker Universe store to meet his dealer, but had been kidnapped and brought here. He’d been photographed in all kinds of bizarre situations: being menaced by a large dog, dressed in women’s underwear, and yesterday, having his hand chopped off. He had no idea why.

The man with the chopper had fainted so I couldn’t question him. I gave him a kick to make me feel better and looked at K’Mayall, but he shook his head. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. I searched the man for cigarettes but dammit, there weren’t any. I was desperate, so I ended up smoking his sausage.

In the corridor my new friend the sparrow was waiting, and she took off as soon as we emerged. We rounded a bend –

- and cold steel pressed against my temple, too close for me to bring up the shotgun. The voice was like the opening of a crypt door.

‘Hello, Eater.’

Dr Maroon. ‘You’ve put on weight,’ I said.

He had two goons with him. Beside me, K’Mayall slumped, looking defeated. They divested me of the shotgun and jabbed us forward with their own pieces.

It was an old trick but I tried it anyhow. ‘Say, Maroon, what’s the difference between a counterfeit dollar and a thin prostitute?’

He smiled unpleasantly. ‘That’s not going to work on me any more.’

Maybe, maybe not. I had to hope that the riddle would torment him on some unconscious level, and thereby distract him. It might be my only chance.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

His face was like the Siberian tundra after an atomic war. ‘The bosses would like to see you now.’

Don't miss the thrilling finale!

1. Which characters aren't what they seem?

2. Will Glark feature?

3. What's the punchline to the riddle and will anyone give it away in the comments beforehand?

The Drugstore Comic Book Incident (V)

2006-09-28T02:24:00.000+09:00

Part five of only very slightly more than six in a thrilling new hardboiled noir serial.

We came through the half-open door at a trot, pushing the startled Hynes back into the apartment. He fell back on the sofa and began to gibber.

‘On! Plaes! Not clowans!’

Arlington Copley Hynes was a proof reader with the city’s top publishing house, and moonlighted as a corksoaker, preparing stoppers for wine bottles. Before this he’d worked in a soft drink factory as a Coke stacker, and for a footwear company as a socktucker. Don’t ask me how I knew him, I just did. I had no idea how he was mixed up in all this, but by G-d I was going to find out.

Sam and I had slung Reverend Brewski’s body in the trunk on top of the Barker guy’s, and had followed the twin trails of blood from the reverend’s stumps back down the street, down several blocks, in fact, until they’d ended abruptly. I figured he’d been thrown out of a car to die like a dog in the road.

On our way to Hynes’s apartment I’d paid a visit to Krabbz and Klapp’s costumiers. I had some dirt on both of them so I didn’t expect any co-operation problems. In the event, neither of them was in and the store was shut. I shouldn’t have been surprised; it was four in the morning, after all. When you’re in a 24-hour job like I am, you tend to see nine-to-five workers as shiftless bums. So I slipped the locks and put a bullet thru the alarm system and Sam and I chose a couple of clown suits and put them on. Makeup as well.

For some reasons Hynes had a clown phobia. I recall hearing that it stemmed from something that had happened to his parents. Myself, I’ve always felt sorry for clowns, ever since I saw one get caught accidentally on a giant hook once at the circus when I was a kid. He hung suspended fifty feet above the ground, while the trapeze artists swung backwards and forwards trying to tug him loose from the hook. It was a half hour before they finally managed to jerk him off.

Sam stood over Hynes and menaced him while I tied him to a kitchen chair with some rope I kept in the car. Then we started interrogating him. I was Good Cop, Sam was Bad. It went something like this:

‘We know you cut off Reverend Brewski’s legs, Arlington.’
‘i dident I don’t no what yuour tlakin abuot’
Honk honk! (this from the novelty hooter Sam was carrying)
‘Aaaagh!’
‘Come on, Arlington, make it easier on yourself.’
‘I swaere Idunno nohtin abotu no leges!’
Squirt squirt! (this from the novelty squirting flower Sam was wearing)
‘glub gulbblubgg’
‘I’m not going to be able to control her, Arlington. Just tell us what we want to know and we’ll be gone.’

A half hour of this and we glanced at each other. It was clear he was telling the truth. He knew nothing about any of it. I sighed, and undid the ropes. My knots were so expert it took me a good five minutes. He slumped, eyes glazed, on the floor.

I lit a cigarette and dropped a couple of bills on him. ‘Buy yourself another guitar.’ Sam raised an eyebrow through the thick layer of pancake. The apartment was virtually wallpapered with the instruments.

*

I drove in a mood as foul as the night. There’d been a queue at the river and all the bricks that would weigh a body down had been used already. We’d finally heaved the two stiffs into the oily stinking water and now I was just driving around aimlessly, trying to think. Beside me, Sam seemed oddly cheerful. I’ll never understand women. Take my ex-wife. That Christmas when she asked for something hot, hard and throbbing between her thighs, how was I to know she wanted a motorbike?

‘Why so chirpy?’ I grunted eventually, unable to stand any more.

‘Stop the car,’ she almost giggled. ‘I’ve been thinking and I’ve realised something.’

I pulled over and she leapt out, beckoning me. I lit a cigarette and went round to her side of the car, scratching uncomfortably at the clown costume. I was beginning to wonder if Krabbz and Klapp were really just the names of the store’s owners.

‘Look.’ She was pointing at the bloody words Brewski had scrawled on the door of the car.’

‘ACH done this.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Look at those letters. That’s a K, not an H.’

I stared. Ack. My G-d.

Ack Maroon. Ayres’s and Barbudo’s chief enforcer. One of the most violent, sadistic men I’d ever met. A snarling, roaring demon from the suppressed nightmares of my past.

This was getting weird.

*

She spent the night at my place, Sam, of course. It was too late for her to return home, and probably unsafe. ‘Do you mind if I share your bed?’ she murmured when we got in the door.

The next morning I woke sore and aching. My right arm did, anyhow. It had been a hell of a job sawing the bed in half. I resolved to replace the metal frame with a wooden one.

She left after we promised to call one another later to review progress. I made myself a quick breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausages, tomatoes, hash browns, grits, pancakes with maple syrup, a half-pound steak, fries, flapjacks, bagels with cream cheese and lox, toast, Cheerios, a chocolate malt, OJ and coffee, washed down with a half bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I know what you’re thinking, but I was on a diet. I lit a couple of cigarettes and glanced at the morning’s headlines. The city’s famous giant gorilla had apparently been kidnapped, if that’s the word, from the zoo. KIDN-APE-D! said the headline. G-d-damn a-shole press men.

I got to work. My first call was to the FBI.

‘Put me thru to Agent Challinor,’ I told the girl. I waited no more than a minute.

‘Challinor here,’ said a cultivated voice.

‘How’re you doing Philip?’ I asked cheerily.

‘You mean, “How are you doing COMMA Philip,” surely?’

The guy’s amazing. He can correct punctuation even in spoken language. It also makes him kind of an a-shole. We have a reciprocal arrangement, him and me. He has access to high-level information that can be of use to me, and in return I supply him with leads on suspected Communists in the city. I’ve never met anyone with such a fanatical loathing of Commies as him. He once broke up with a broad because she painted her nails red. Not only that, he got her thirty years in Sing-Sing too.

‘I need all the poop you got on the Cosifantuttis,’ I said, lighting a cigarette. ‘First names, the size of their outfit, what sort of rackets they run, that kind of thing.’

‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you back.’

He was as good as his word and five minutes later I was scribbling in my notebook. Linguini and Ravioli Cosifantutti were the joint bosses of a Bolognese mob family who had set up in this town about five years earlier. Little was known about them or their associates, but they were thought to be involved in drugs, prostitution and protection racketeering. Their main source of income, however, was illegal wicker. And there were rumors that they were trying to kick-start a revival in the underground comic book market.

I gripped the receiver and gritted my teeth as the room swirled and the flashbacks snowballed thru my head like wildfire.

Once I’d got a hold of myself I thanked Challinor for his information.

‘What have you got for me?’ he said.

I gave him the names of two guys I’d overheard in my local bar making negative remarks about the death penalty. I swear I heard him slavering as he put down the phone.

Next I called Laughs and brought her up to speed. I gave it to her straight. She went quiet after I told her of the possible Mob connection. Poor gal. I took a hard hit off of the JD bottle. I learned a long time ago not to care; but damn, it’s hard sometimes.

Then I called Lieutenant O’Nann. He was out of breath as though he’d been exerting himself. He had a positive ID on the handless corpse: a small-time wicker dealer named Ball Bag. They’d brought his mother, Mrs Noreen Bag, in to identify him, but in the end it had been dental records as they couldn’t understand the mother’s accent, and couldn’t in any case pick out any words in her speech that weren’t obscenities.

In return I told O’Nann a pack of lies about my own investigation. To tell the truth, he didn’t sound much interested. He said all his staff had been drafted by the Commissioner into the search for the missing gorilla.

I got thru a package of smokes and a quart of JD before the phone rang. I picked it up, expecting Sam. Instead, a vaguely familiar female voice said: ‘Did you hear about the ship carrying nothing but red paint that crashed into the ship carrying nothing but brown paint?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Did you hear about the ship carrying nothing but red paint that crashed into the ship carrying nothing but brown paint?’

I began to feel a prickle down my neck, up my cr-tch and across my face. Something wasn’t right.

The lady paused for effect, then said: ‘The crew were marooned!’

It was a set-up, and I knew who by, and I turned but not quickly enough and I got a sense of movement behind me and a crashing blow to the back of my head, and then darkness.

He seems to have forgotten about the dog, doesn’t he?

a) He’s a hard-bitten private eye, so he’s got no time for sentimentality.
b) For God’s sake, he has to keep the word count down somehow.
c) I’ve a feeling the dog will be back…

The Drugstore Comic Book Incident (IV)

2006-09-24T00:05:00.000+09:00

Part four of barely more than six in a thrilling new hardboiled noir serial.

The blast sang in my ears and the room lit up in the muzzle flash. I kept my eyes open all the way through, waiting for the punch of the slug and the final searing pain.

The man slammed back against the wall and slid down, leaving a dark smear on the wallpaper. The air stank of cordite. She stepped into my field of vision on the left, a broad I didn’t know with a British-made Browning dwarfing her small fist.

I got up and staggered over to the guy - C---st but my g---ds hurt - but she’d gotten him smack in the heart and I knew he was a goner even before I felt his neck. I pulled the stocking off his head. Bearded, but he was nobody I recognized.

She stood with her gun lowered. First things first. I went over to Monstee who was making tiny squeaking noises on the carpet. I picked her up, looked in her eyes, at her teeth. She was sick, but alive. I put her down in her basket in the corner and made a phone call. It was the early hours of the morning but he’d come.

She was tall and fine-boned and fair, and her eyes were not on me but on the man she’d shot. In her hand there was the faintest tremor. I lit a cigarette.

‘You look like you could use a stiff one.’

‘I’d prefer a drink, if you don’t mind,’ she said.

I don’t give out my Jack Daniels to people I’ve just met, even if they have just saved my life, so she had to settle for a generous shot of my 125-year-old Islay single malt. As I busied myself with the drinks I saw her glancing around at the décor, clearly doubtful. I sympathized with her. The guy I’d hired to decorate had gotten it all the wrong way round. For instance, I asked him for a thin blue carpet in my front hall, and instead he put a thick pink one up my back passage. I handed her a glass and lit a cigarette and squinted at her across the smoke.

‘Are you one of those femme fatales?’

‘Femmes fatales,’ she corrected. ‘No.’

‘Are you the plucky young journalist who investigates a crime even after her boss has told her to lay off?’

‘No!’ she chuckled. ‘That’s a whole other genre.’

As the Scotch took effect she began to speak more flowingly. Her name was Sam P C Bride, and she was, like me, a private eye. She’d been hired two days earlier by a drifter named Joe K’Mayall. He was a curiously humorless young man who’d turned up at her office and asked her to shadow him for a few days as he was afraid that he might disappear suddenly. In that event, she was to find out what had happened to him. He’d paid her a handsome sum up front. In the early hours of this morning she’d tracked him to the Wicker Universe on Charles Manson Ave; when she’d got there she’d found a crime scene, the cops. Me. She’d caught a glimpse of the handless corpse and seen that it wasn’t her client, but she’d sensed a link and had followed me home.

I don’t believe in dames as private dicks, but there was something about this broad – her heady perfume, the way she crossed her legs – that was making my head swim. The door buzzer went and she put her hand on her Browning and I fingered Pussy but it was the guy I’d phoned earlier and I let him up. Dr Joe McCrumble arrived in a fluster of muscular apologies. I told him that Monstee had been poisoned but that I’d seen in her eyes the unmistakeable sign of a Filey worm infestation. He picked her up and looked in her eyes and turned his head to me and nodded once, his mouth grim-set. Of all the things to come out of North Yorkshire, the Filey worm is the most terrible. He took her away, resolving wordlessly to do his best. He would, of course, as long as I held on to those negatives.

Once he’d gone I went over to the corpse against the wall and searched him. His driver’s license said he was Justin Barker, from Valencia, which was one of the vilest ghettoes in the city. In his wallet I also found a sheet of paper which had this list written on it:

Hands: $20/pair

Feet: $25/pair

Heads: $100 each

Torsos: $50 each

Dogs: $100 (one-off only)

Sexual vibrators: $500

Foot Eater: $75 (dead), $150 (alive)

I lit a cigarette.

Sam stared down at the page. I held it up to the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling.

‘There,’ I said.

Barely visible on the page, in the glare from the bulb, was a watermark. Three letters, interlinked in a highly stylized way. C, F and T.

Cosifantutti. The most recently established and most brutal Mob family in the city. If this Barker guy who’d poisoned Monstee and then taken photos of her, and had then fought and tried to kill me, was mixed up with the Cosifantutti family then things were more frightening, more high-level than I’d thought.

I sat with Sam Bride after that for a couple of hours, smoking and drinking and listening to her slivers of intelligence and giving her shafts of mine. Yes, dammit, there was a charge there; but we were professionals, and our best bet was to co-operate.

So. We had a common link with the wicker store. An apparent bounty hunter had shown up on my doorstep with an agenda: he was to procure body parts, and mine in particular. Apart from that, we knew flip-all. (Later in this story there’ll be far more occasion for ripe language, so I’m getting you used to the euphemistic flip word early on.)

I thought about calling O’Nann about Barker’s body but decided that I didn’t need the cops stamping their clod-hopping hooves all over this. Sam and I agreed that we’d dump the corpse quietly in the river.

Before we left my apartment I made a list of things I needed to do in the morning:

Phone my contact in the FBI to find out more about the Cosifantutti mob

Call the Laughs broad and update her vis a vis the investigation (and negotiate an increased drink and smoke expenses budget)

Phone O’Nann and find out who the dead handless guy is

*

Together we hefted the Barker body down the stairs and along the street to my battered ’37 Camaro. I was opening the trunk when Sam screamed.

Alongside my car was a… torso, I guess you’d call it. It was a legless person, his arms batting against the rear door and his thigh-stumps sucking at the tarmac. His legs had been amputated at the inguinal crease.

I lit a cigarette.

Then I rushed round but he was dead, his mouth drooling congealment. I recognized him immediately. It was Reverend Brewski, the leading advocate of Temperance in this city. Many was the time I’d watched him on my TV screen ranting against the evils of drink and stimulants and bebop jazz. Now he sprawled at my feet, stinking of blood and death and wicker.

‘Look,’ whispered Sam, pointing.

I looked. On the side of my car, in his own blood, the reverend had scrawled something. I stooped, staring closer. In bloody scraggling letters it said:

ACH DONE THIS

ACH. Arlington Copley Hynes.

G-d damn.

A proper lead. At last.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Sam as I reached across her and slammed the passenger door shut.

‘We’re going to visit someone I know.’ I said. ‘But first, we’ve got to find us some clown costumes.’

I tried to light a cigarette but my package was finished.

Damn.

Will this story:

ever be finished in under 12 episodes?

feature any explicit sex, as promised?

include a femme fatale?

Uncanny

2006-09-23T01:33:00.000+09:00

The Drugstore Comic Book Incident (interlude)

2006-09-19T16:29:00.000+09:00

Staring down the barrel of a loaded gun sure focuses your mind.

And broadens your sphincters.

It’s a cliché, but your life really does flash before your eyes. It happened the last time I was on the point of death, jammed in the closet with the mayor coming up the stairs and his wife scrambling to get dressed, and it happened now.

It played before my gaze like a speeded-up newsreel, stopping at significant milestones: my seventh birthday party, known forever after as the Bay Hill Cookie Massacre, when I’d sat cradling my granddaddy’s head and wishing him to be alive even though his body was thirty yards away; my seventeenth summer working on the farm, where I’d made some very special friends; the day I got my shield. But it kept snagging at one particular spot: my final session with my therapist.

It was two years ago now, and I had gone along on a Tuesday morning like any other. I hadn’t intended it to be my last session but the things that came up in it were so painful that I couldn’t go back afterwards. My analyst, SheBah, had legs that went all the way up to heaven and back down again. Twice. What I mean is, once per leg. Oh hell, you figure it out. Anyhow, at first I thought this was going to be a distraction but in fact she used it to therapeutic advantage, as you got so hypnotised by those pins you ended up speaking in an uninhibited way.

I’d begun therapy after my wife split because I felt I needed to resolve my issues about women. I’d always had a view of dames as being like cappuccino coffee: light and frothy on the top, dark and bitter underneath. I also needed help with the lousy puns that had started to infest my speech and writing like nits.

SheBah seemed to be of the opinion that I had a lot of unresolved anger and bitterness, and she felt there were areas of my life I wasn’t willing to discuss. That day she proposed to hypnotise me. I didn’t believe in all that stuff but I agreed anyway, and soon I felt myself detached and dreamy in the semi-darkness of her rooms, staring at the calf swinging on the end of her chair with its tiny gold ankle bracelet winking in the light.

I found myself talking, guided by her soothing murmur, about getting fired from the force ten years earlier. At the time I’d been giving a series of highly-regarded seminars on planting evidence when this young upstart uniformed officer, Hutton, started making complaints, first to me and then to the Commissioner, about the ‘morality’ of my methods. G-d-damned bleeding heart pinko bedwetter. One day he opened his locker in front of a roomful of fellow cops and out tumbled leather bondage gear, whips, chains, women’s pantyhose and a few other unmentionables. Somehow he managed to prove that I’d put it there, and I got canned.

I’d drifted after that, and as so often happens, I’d been taken in by the allure of comic books. I won’t go into details, but within three months I was working in an abandoned warehouse down by the docks for two of the sleaziest barons in the illegal comics world, Kim Ayres and his foul cousin El Barbudo. I’d been recruited by their enforcer, Dr Maroon, who was if anything even sleazier and more brutal than they were, by promises of easy riches. More fool me.

There were a few of us, losers and drop-outs to a man – and, I’m sorry to say, to a woman. We’d stand for hours in the freezing cold of the warehouse, the barges rumbling past outside like great whales, while one of the illustrators drew us in various bizarre poses. Sometimes we had to mime beating each other up, sometimes attacking each other with chainsaws or axes; real sick stuff, it was. The pictures didn’t even look like us. After a 14-hour day of this, we’d be herded into our windowless ten foot cube of a room underground and fed a grim meal before lights out.

For a year I did this. I was helpless, addicted, though I couldn’t tell you how exactly. Week after week Blunt Cogs was churned out onto the streets of the city to corrupt young and old alike, the scenarios we were forced to pose for becoming ever more twisted and perverse.

I escaped one day, not without a struggle, and not without the help of one man. Binty McShae was the comic’s best illustrator. I’d watch him as he drew us, and I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. I won’t go into details now about how I persuaded Binty to change sides and how he and I bust out, but I’d never repaid him for it and that’s why I had to say yes when his wife had asked me for help.

And now it was too late. There wasn’t even time for a last cigarette.

The Drugstore Comic Book Incident (III)

2006-09-14T02:37:00.000+09:00

Part three of absolutely, definitely no more than six in a thrilling new hardboiled noir serial.

I’d called the cops from the payphone down the street and they’d arrived within a half hour. The one in charge was an old, familiar face: Lieutenant Finbar O’Nann, who’d been a sergeant on Vice back when I’d been on the force and who had transferred to homicide to fill my shoes after I had… well, after I’d left.

The crime scene boys got busy and O’Nann stood watching with one hand fidgeting about in his trouser pocket and the other full of the sunflower seeds he was partial to. He was big and Irish and short-sighted, with coarse red hair in his ears and nose and on his palms, which rasped unpleasantly when you shook hands with him. I hadn’t this time.

‘Lemme get this straight,’ he said. ‘You happened to be passing by when you saw the door of this store open, so you looked inside and found this.’

‘That’s right,’ I said, and took a nip from my hip flask. He squinted across at me, a look on his face like a thorn tree in winter.

‘You realize I could take you back to the station house and have the truth beaten out of you.’

I smiled. I’d taught those guys everything they knew about extracting a confession by force. I lit a cigarette. The only reason I was hanging around now was that I needed O’Nann’s help – an ID on the stiff, for starters – and I figured he’d be willing to trade. I’d searched the dead guy myself, of course, but he wasn’t carrying any credentials, just fifteen bucks which I pocketed. Hell, I don’t get many perks in this job.

One of the crime scene techs was taking photos. The flash from the camera lit up the walls which were sprayed maroon. Whoever had severed the guy’s hands had done it before he was dead, because the arteries in the wrists had continued pumping. The wounds were clean ones. The hands were missing.

‘Must of tooken his hands to stop us fingerprinting him,’ remarked O’Nann, the fidgeting in his pocket becoming more frantic. He gets off on this kind of thing. The hand holding the sunflower seed was shaking too.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘In that case they would have taken his teeth as well so you couldn’t check ‘em against dental records.’ I lit a cigarette.

He glared at me. ‘So what do you suggest then, smart-ss?’ He nibbled a sunflower seed.

I shrugged. ‘Hand fetishist, maybe. Check your files. Or he was wearing lots of rings so the killer took the hands to save time. Doesn’t explain why they were cut off before he died, though.’

He agreed grumpily to keep me updated on his findings if I did likewise with whatever investigation I was involved in, and I split. As I left I heard him sigh, and without looking round I knew he’d spilled his seed on the ground.

*

I walked home through streets that were already becoming muggy again after the rain. The sidewalks were awash and I gave up trying to sidestep the puddles. G-d-damn frigging city with its G-d-damn lousy stinking drainage system. I stopped at my regular all-night liquor store for JD and smokes but it was being held up by a couple of hoods when I went in, so I had to go the one down the street where the owner charged me full price.

Home was a second-storey apartment in a faceless brick tenement in midtown. I moved there two years ago when my wife walked out. She said the final straw was when I gave her that bad case of crabs. I still kick myself today. She loved seafood but I’d left it out of the freezer too long.

I let myself into the lobby and took the stairs, feeling jaded. I had one missing guy, one dead guy and a wicker connection. I’d searched the wicker store before calling the cops, of course, but had found nothing. Maybe O’Nann and his boys would come up with something.

As I climbed the last few steps to my door I listened out for Monstee, my bitch. She’s a rare breed of terrier, a genetic dead-end with blue hair and low cunning. When I get home she sinks her teeth bone-deep into my leg and I kick her off against the wall. She p--ses on my head and I do the same to her. We horse around like this for a good ten minutes. It’s like love.

This time there was no tick of claws on lino, no frantic joyous whimpering. I pushed the door open. Light from the hall spilled into my living room.

I lit a cigarette.

There, crawling piteously across the carpet, was Monstee, her eyes staring at me pleadingly. Red foam was coming out her maw and there was the smell of beefsteak hanging in the air. Right away I knew she’d been poisoned. Standing over her, his face obscured with a nylon stocking, was a man. In his hands was a camera.

Taking pictures of my Monstee.

I was on him in a second but he was fast and brought his hands up and in one of them he had a gun so I kept myself close to stop him being able to take aim. I got him in a headlock and close up I could smell the wicker on him. He grappled me and we turned and crashed, sending the coffee table shattering. He got a good kick in, right up in the privates, and I reeled away but I couldn’t let myself get too far because of that G-d-damned gun so I rolled toward him again and dove for his legs and sent him thudding against the wall.

The neighbor started yelling and I cussed back at her thru the wall. I felt sick from the kick to the jewels and I could feel my strength draining. He got in a kick to my head and the floor lurched. I looked up at him, watching the barrel of the gun center on me.

Sic transit gloria Podophagi…

Bang.

Is this the end for Foot Eater?

a) Don’t be ridiculous, he’s the narrator telling the tale in the past tense.

b)Ah, but he could be telling this story from the afterlife!

c)Who cares, tell me if the dog survived!

Intermission (sort of)

2006-09-11T15:53:00.000+09:00

Reality intrudes, so posting will be light for the next couple of weeks, though I should have the next episode of The Drugstore Comic Book Incident up in a few days' time.

Meanwhile, why not check out the two latest additions to my link list. Fat Sparrow and Old Bitter Balls fill a four-letter-word-shaped hole in the blogging world left after El Barbudo and Anti-Barney went quiet. Pedants be warned, though: Old Knudsen wouldn't know a properly punctuated sentence if it kicked him in the bollocks.

The Drugstore Comic Book Incident (II)

2006-09-05T04:38:00.000+09:00

Part two of no more than six in a thrilling new hardboiled noir serial.

I walked the rain-soaked streets through the city’s neon glare and as I walked I smoked and I flipped the spent butts into the puddles where they sizzled like little cancer fireflies.

I’d been working the city all day, paying visits and checking my networks. Nothing. I was heading for a dead-end bar downtown where my best stool pigeon was sure to be.

The dame’s name was Laughs, Sarah Laughs, though she didn’t seem to do much laughing around me. Few people do. She’d been married to McShae a little over six months. By the sound of it things had been going great, so when he hadn’t come home one evening a month earlier it had been a bolt out of the blue. He had no family he might have gone to, and she’d checked out his friends but they hadn’t seen him either. McShae sold wicker furniture for a living. That immediately got my suspicions up. The illegal wicker trade is worth a fortune. If he was messing around with that s—t then he was in more trouble than she realized. Assuming he was still alive at all.

I had to go looking for him because he was the only link I had to something very terrible that had happened to me ten years earlier. God alone knew where Ayres or Maroon or Barbudo were now, so crossing paths with McShae like this was like – I’m going to say something quite hard to swallow now, so if you’re a lady you might want to skip to the next paragraph, though if you’re a lady you shouldn’t really be reading this tale anyhow – it was like Providence offering to s—k your c—k for you.

I got to the bar, Bo Khaki, a little after midnight and threw the empty bottle of JD into the alleyway down the side. The doorman was getting ready to move aside for me but I hit him anyway because I needed the practise. Inside was the stink of booze and sweat and nixed hopes. Every loser and weirdo in town was there, it seemed: that crazy Irishman who had issues with toy dinosaurs was arm-wrestling the gal from Boston with the attitude (and coming off second best); that God-damn scientist guy was using some contraption he’d invented to try and look up the skirt of the Irish broad who did kick-boxing (as he’d soon find out); and that smart-a-- Brit expat from North Carolina was trying to impress the cute San Francisco broad who always comes across so innocent. He didn't see the razor she was holding behind her back.

Bo, the bar’s owner, had my triple JD – rocks, no water or soda – under my nose before I could say where's my God-damn JD. It’s a friendly enough place, Bo Khaki, though the waitresses all wear this horrible shiny slimy makeup which I haven’t figured out yet.

I lit a cigarette. My stoolie, SafeT, was perched next to me and he groaned when I tapped his lid. He’s nuts, like most of them in here; he thinks he’s a robot and wears this kind of dustbin. Back when I was a cop I’d used him very effectively and he’d kind of stayed on. Loyalty, perhaps, or else he was scared s—tless of me. Hell, I scare myself s--tless.

‘How’s tricks?’ I asked. I lit a cigarette, didn’t offer him one. He was drinking two-stroke engine oil, taking his artificial persona a little far, I thought.

‘Same old,’ he said, trying to sound metallic. I held out a photo between my first two fingers, keeping the other two folded over a twenty-dollar bill in my palm. He looked at it, shook his head rustily.

‘Name’s McShae. Scotch.’

‘Oh, okay,’ said SafeT and tried to get Bo’s attention. I sighed and clanged his lid shut, catching one of his ears. When he prised it open again I said, ‘I didn’t want a Scotch. He’s a Scotch. McShae.’

He muttered something and I ignored him and gave him some details. He took the photo and told me to give him a half hour. I sat and drank and smoked and tried to ignore the bitter howling wind within my soul.

SafeT was as good as his word – he wouldn’t dare not to be – and was back in under thirty minutes. He gave me back the photo and jerked a corroded thumb over his shoulder.

‘Guy back there. Refuses to talk to you but says he saw this McShae here, downtown, the night he disappeared. He was scared-looking, that’s how the guy remembered him, and he was alone. He was at the Wicker Universe store down on Charles Manson Avenue, knocking on the door, after hours, and someone opened up and he went in.’

Damn wicker. I knew it. I gave SafeT the twenty and, after a moment’s hesitation, fished out of my pocket a lube job voucher. I’m getting soft in my old age.

*

I reached the Wicker Universe in fifteen minutes and did a quick scout round the building to see if there were any lights to suggest a security guard. Nada. The triple locks on the front door were more complicated than I’d seen in a while and it took me a full ninety seconds to crack them. I eased the door open. The smell hit me first, that hazy, dangerous sweet aroma of newly woven wicker. I pressed a handkerchief against my mouth and nose. With my other hand I groped in my pocket for Pussy. I had a bad feeling about this.

When I felt I could trust myself not to be overcome by the smell I put the handkerchief away and found my flashlight. I flicked it on and saw a broken dark line stretching away across the lino floor. I bent closer.

Blood.

I followed the trail which became a smear and then, behind a dense-weave patio set (despite what I saw next I had to admire the craftsmanship), I found the man. He was lying face-up in a sticky pool which was brown in the torchlight but was obviously his lifeblood. He wasn’t McShae. In his wide-open eyes was a look of utter, cosmic horror.

I couldn’t figure out immediately how he had died but I could see right away that something had been done to him beforehand. Something very nasty indeed.

I lit a cigarette.

What has been done to the poor man? Has he:

a) been dogged senseless?
b) received a year’s subscription to Reader’s Digest for his birthday?
c) *** ** ******* *** in **** *aa** * *******?!

Or suggest something of your own. The best idea goes into the next instalment!

Glory days

2006-09-02T11:08:00.000+09:00

This is the Boss, Bruce Springsteen, one of my all-time rock heroes. I’ve seen him live in London twice – Earl’s Court Olympia in 1999 and Crystal Palace Stadium in 2003 - and I own all his albums. Sometimes I play his 1975-1985 live collection at full blast while reading Dostoevsky. I've cut down because the passengers in my car aren't too happy about this combination, the philistines.

Anyway: back in 1985 Springsteen had a single called Glory Days. It’s about baseball for the most part, but also about lost dreams.

Last night I took a mildly wine-soaked trawl through the scant history of The Fishwhacker Swindle – this self-same blog – and I concluded, once and for all, that three of the people I link to there on the left are actually one and the same person. They know who they are.

I also concluded that my own glory days were in January this year (2006). Back then I was starting to gain some commenters and a little respect. Even the great Gorilla Bananas used to comment in those days. I still regard this two-part post as my finest hour so far; yet the second instalment got fewer responses than the first. I’ve reached a wider audience in the eight months since then, and I’ve censored myself accordingly. Is this a good thing? I would never post something like The Neckrofyle nowadays.

I have two questions for you, gentle readers.

1. What do you regard as your own glory days, blogesquely speaking? (i.e. which is your favourite post on your blog?)

2. Which is your favourite post on this blog? (Supplementary question: should Coca-Cola bring back New Coke?)

I'm serious about this. Please let me know.

The Drugstore Comic Book Incident (I)

2006-09-01T10:10:00.000+09:00

Part one of six in a thrilling new hardboiled noir serial.

I was a little over halfway through my first bottle of Jack D of the night when I heard the footsteps coming up the corridor to my office.

A woman’s footsteps, high heels clicking over lino (which kind of muffled the clicking and spoiled the effect to some extent). I sat in my chair with my back to the door and took a hit from the tumbler of Daniels (rocks, no water or soda) and lit a cigarette. From the sound of her heels and the distance between her steps I figured she was long in the leg and broad in the hip. Just the way I like a dame.

I swiveled round in my chair to face the door. I lit a cigarette. I always have the lights off after midnight but the blinds were open and the light from the giant neon 9/11 sign across the street slanted in sweepingly to bathe my desk and the doorway in a harsh blue wash. I sucked on my cigarette and tweaked the top drawer of the desk ajar. Pussy, my partner, revealed her butt. She’s a beauty. The reason she’s called Pussy is that she’s a nine millimetre, which the G-d-damn NRA a--holes reckon can’t stop a rampaging sheep. They say you can’t kill s--t without at least a 45 mm. I say with the right man behind the gun you can stop a rhino with a single slug, never mind the caliber.

I smoked and I watched the doorway with Pussy nearby and before long this broad appeared in the doorway and pointed a pair of 38s at me. For all I knew she had a gun as well. She was wrapped in an evening dress made out of silvery nothingness and she had the kind of smoldering eyes that could melt steel at twenty-five paces. Her hair was flame red. As though it was on fire. Which it was.

I threw the rest of the contents of the JD bottle over her which wasn’t such a good idea as the fire in her hair got worse so I ripped the fire extinguisher off the wall and sprayed her till she was smoking but not smoldering and she threw away her cigarette holder with a rueful grimace.

‘I’ll get to the point’ she said. I laughed inside. A few paces forward and she’d be right on top of the point. I lit a cigarette.

‘You are Mr Foot Eater, Private Detective.’ She said it as though it was a fact, which it was, even though technically I’d lost my license after that episode with the senator’s garden gnome and the Mexican maid.

‘I want you to find my husband. He’s vanished.’

‘Yeah, yeah…’ I started to say. I lit a cigarette. I’d heard the story a thousand times before. Guy marries classy dame, starts fooling around after a couple years, runs off with secretary, wife gets jealous and wants some PI to track the guy to Peru or Sweden or wherever the ----. Once upon a time I’d have taken the chick’s money and clocked up a nice little earner, a couple months on five bucks an hour, and at the end I’d have told her, hey, sorry honey, but your man’s not coming back, oh, and by the way, here’s the bill. But I’m older now than I was then.

She cut me off, this broad with the silvery slinky dress and the melons. I fished a penknife out of my pocket and peeled one of them as she spoke. I don’t usually take bribes but I’m partial to fruit. I smoked while I ate.

‘I want you to find my husband,’ she said, planting herself on my desk top, ‘and I know you will, because you know him. You were once part of a cartoon series with him.’

I went cold.

‘His name’s Binty. Binty McShae.’

I went colder.

In that instant, I knew I had to take on this broad, follow her down whatever hellish road she was leading me.

McShae. Maroon. Ayres. Barbudo.

My world went spinning.

I lit a cigarette.

You direct this story! Is the mystery broad:

a) Sarah?
b) Sam, ProblemChildBride?
c) FatMammyCat?

Suburb of the dead

2006-08-30T02:21:00.000+09:00

You know the feeling you get when you’re ten years old and you come home from school only to find that your family’s gone away on holiday for a fortnight? That’s the feeling I had when my dear departed dog came loping in through the front door one evening last week, dripping bits of earth and dog flesh on the carpet: annoyance and disappointment in equal measure. After I’d been persuaded that Fritz wasn’t coming back, I’d got round to burying him in the woods with no small effort, and I’d gone through the normal painful stages of grief and achieved closure. Now he had come back.

He tried to lick me but bits of his decaying tongue kept sticking to my hands and face, so I led him out the back and bashed his head off with a shovel. You might think that sounds callous but he wasn’t the Fritz I’d known and loved. After chopping and bagging him up and getting a good bonfire going, I phoned the council. Tracey, the chirpy young lady who took my call, didn’t know why my dog had returned from the dead but promised to look into it for me.

A few days later she rang back in a state of some excitement. A Professor Bertram of the Department of Dark Age History at Essex University had done some research and discovered that the woods where I had laid Fritz to rest had been the burial ground of the Saxon king Thicric and his family in the sixth century. Legend had it that Thicric had fallen foul of a witch’s curse that specified that if a dog should ever be buried in the hallowed ground, it and all beings previously interred there would walk the earth again. Why the curse took this particular form I didn’t find out, because I was too busy writing letters of complaint to the previous owner of my house and to the surveyors about their failure to disclose this information to me before I moved in.

Since then, it’s been non-stop. You can’t step out your front door around these parts without encountering one of the bloody living dead. The older ones, the Saxon lot, aren’t so bad because they’re mostly just skeletons and are quite clean, though they don’t half scratch the paintwork on your car. It’s the more recent burials that are the problem, the East End gangster victims who have only partially decomposed. They leave a trail of skin and other bits wherever they go – I found a large intestine draped over my garden fence yesterday morning – and they’re always trying to bite you as though they watched too many zombie films when they were alive and think they can turn you into one of them by giving you a nip. (They can’t.) Plus, they make that awful undead noise, halfway between a moan and a shriek, which is guaranteed to keep the neighbourhood awake at night. This morning I was upstairs in the bath and one of the buggers appeared at the window. Turns out he used to be a small-time cat burglar called Billy the Finger, who upset one of the Hackney drug barons.

Vampirella is all soft-hearted and keeps trying to strike up conversations with these creatures and invite them in for a cup of tea and suchlike. Me, I’ve decided enough’s enough. So, if any of you are in the Brentwood area this Friday and would like to join me and some of the lads on a cull, you’re most welcome. Bring a spade, a machete if you’ve got one, and plenty of binliner bags.

I smell you

2006-08-26T08:51:00.000+09:00

Stop watching me. I’m warning you.

All of you. You know who you are, oh yes, you do. You think you’re so clever, writing with such disparate voices, but I’m on to you.

Under the name of “Binty” you post an essay on your weblog referring to George Orwell, on the very same day that I make some Orwell-themed remarks. Today, I post comments on your various blogs – “Kim Ayres”, “Doctor Maroon” and others – and you respond within minutes.

But don’t you gloat too soon, Mr/Mrs/Ms Smarty-Pants. I’m on to you.

I started with the light bulbs. Took them all out and put putty in the sockets. Took all the curtains down after that and stuck corrugated iron up which I found in the rubbish tip on the other side of the field. Then I got rid of all the screens in the house apart from my PC monitor. Threw the TVs into the skip in the back alley.

The colour orange has something to do with all of this that you’re planning, as does that Dave Brubeck tune that goes on forever. I’ll figure it out, don’t you worry.

And then I’m coming to get you.

Post 101

2006-08-23T02:36:00.000+09:00

One of the unadulterated delights of working in the NHS is the nagging you’re constantly subject to. Need to empty your bowels at work? Fill in a Defecation Permission Request Form. Don’t have this form? Fill out a Defecation Permission Request Form Request Form. Don’t have a pen with which to fill out the form? Fill out a Ballpoint Request, Excuse and Apology Form. No toilet paper in the loo? That’s too bad, but bog roll is unnecessary as it requires the cutting down of the rain forests and we should all be using bidets instead. No bidets? Have patience, we have to prioritise resources and you don’t seriously want patient care to be compromised just so that you can clean your anus, do you?

The latest round of hectoring and finger-wagging comes wearing the mantle of ‘revalidation’. All general practitioners and hospital consultants now have to undergo this process every five years or so. It involves an avalanche of paperwork, and requires you to indicate whether or not you’re a psychopathic murderer, or, more specifically, to prove that you’re not one. You do this by collecting thank-you cards and letters of endorsement from your patients and colleagues (I’m not making this up); enough of these, it seems, and you must be a swell individual who could never turn out to be another Harold Shipman.

Shipman, for those who don’t know, was a GP who murdered at least 300 of his elderly patients over several decades but committed suicide in prison in January 2004, thus taking the secrets of his motivation with him to the grave. The government seems to have got the idea that he was merely the tip of a murderous iceberg and that doctors are intrinsically dodgy characters (unlike politicians, of course). The whole purpose of the revalidation exercise is to ‘restore public confidence’ in the medical profession. As somebody said in a hilarious but spot-on letter to one of the medical journals last week: why, in the wake of the killing spree by the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, did the government not introduce a revalidation system for lorry drivers (since Sutcliffe drove a truck for a living)? Why not, indeed? There’s no evidence that Shipman’s murderousness had anything to do with his being a doctor, other than that he was afforded a greater opportunity to kill his victims.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Room 101 contains the worst thing in the world. This being my 101st post, I thought I’d do an Orwell tie-in. The worst thing in the world is Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt.

One hundredth post

2006-08-22T01:43:00.000+09:00

I understand it's customary to say a few words on the occasion of one's hundredth post, so here they are.

To today's guitar bands

2006-08-17T00:13:00.000+09:00

You strut, with such artfully tousled hair,
Across the stage of Britain’s dying wastes.
Your low-rise denim’s ripped with utmost care;
Your fans lap up your faux-bohemian tastes.
Your style betrays stunted imagination
You’re spawn and father of your generation.

‘We stick it to the man!’ you sneer on stage,
While Sugar Daddy chuckles from the wings.
Laugh at the club girls dancing in their cage -
You’re trapped as they are, corporate playthings.
You differ from boy bands only this far:
You have no clue what prostitutes you are.

‘Let’s give ourselves a name that sticks in minds!’
The Arctic Monkeys, The Streets, Razorlight…
‘And write really deep songs with words what rhymes.’
And that’s just the beginning of the shite –
Why must Mockney be the accent of choice,
The more pronounced, the more genteel the voice?

‘We’re paying tribute to our favourite bands
Like Pink Floyd, Led Zep, Clapton and his blues.’
I fear you twats tread on the shifting sands
Where homage and pastiche become confused.
Will ten years hence a man his guitar pluck
In tribute to you wankers? Will he fuck.

You corporate sock-puppets, willing slaves,
Who dare to call yourselves rebellious!
Yesterday’s giants are spinning in their graves
As you squander the chance they gave to us.
‘We fight for individuality.’
Can you dicks spell originality?

Despite all this, I wish no ill of you.
I’d hate a guitar to electrocute
You on stage, or, when you try hard to poo,
Massive warts to be blocking up your chute.
(My doctor says repeat these last four lines
Fifteen times a day, and I should be fine.)

Mahmoud and I

2006-08-14T23:50:00.000+09:00

I come back to find that Iran's President Ahmadinejad and I have more in common than I’d thought. He’s just started his own blog, and it’s a cracker. As with most blogs, the first entry is one of such devastating literary beauty that I wept blood when I read it.

Ahmadinejad, or Ack as he’s known in the blogging world, has deftly pre-empted charges of hypocrisy by using only software from non-American companies in his blog, and consequently such giants of Iranian technology as Yahoo and Google feature prominently. He’s also careful to provide English translations of his original Persian writing so that those pesky Israelis don’t start misrepresenting his words again.

I decided to copy Harry Hutton’s technique and sent the President this email.

Dear President Ahmadinejad

I think the producers will definitely take you into consideration, though you’re certainly being quite brave with the whole image change thing. There’s never been a bearded Bond so far. Mind you, I reckon you need the beard to butch up a bit and offset that rather camp fringe.

Yours sincerely

Mr Foot Eater, England

Except I didn’t, because I can’t make head or tail of his blog, can’t even identify it as a blog, in fact, and got all my information about it second hand here.

Foot Eater's Unoriginal Miscellany

2006-07-15T04:13:00.000+09:00

The life cycle of a typical blogger:

First post: some rant about how complicated Blogger is, or an apology for the fact that this is a test. Second post: an awkward attempt at a humorous take on a topical news item. Third post: a favourable comment, together with a link, about someone else’s blog. Fourth post: a feebly witty commentary on how the blog’s going so far. Fifth post: a drunken outpouring of rage about how nobody seems to be visiting or commenting. Sixth post: a confessional-type effort about work or school days or relationships or whatever. Seventh post: a pathetically grateful effort thanking those few people who have commented and providing links to their blogs. Eighth to approximately 39th posts: various topics, received with varying degrees of enthusiasm by readers (as evidenced by numbers of comments). Fortieth to 52nd posts: more of the same, with added apologies about the infrequency of posting. Fifty-third to 80th posts: a return to the self-referential themes of the first eight (with optional lengthy absence of up to six weeks, prompting a barrage of comments asking after the site-owner’s welfare). Eighty-first post onwards: sink or swim time, in which either the frequency of posting reaches a steady state of between one and seven posts per week, or the blog owner announces tearfully that he or she is giving up blogging because of work and family commitments but would like to thank everyone for being there for him or her, etc, etc.

BBC Radio Four. What’s it like? The only things really worth listening to any more are I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue, where you can hear the octogenarian jazz supremo Humphrey Lyttelton delivering some of the filthiest, most finely-judged double entendres around, and In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, which is 45 weekly minutes of the most sumptuous and intelligent discussion of anything – art, science, philosophy – you’re likely to hear on air anywhere in the world. I still listen to the Today programme most mornings on the way to work, but lately I’ve had fantasies of a Blunt Cogs version, with Dr Maroon and SamProblemChildBride as the anchors, LindyK reading the news bulletins, Binty McShae as the sports editor (bit of a theme developing here, but then the Scotch have taken over the Beeb), and the religious slot Thought For The Day being taken alternately by El Barbudo and Anti-Barney.

I like the way Arlington Hynes updates his posts with quotes from the comments. Must steal that. Arlington did a very brilliant thing in using a gimmick – his bizarre spelling – from the outset of his blogging career. Must remember that for when I’m reincarnated.

Where’s the Emerald Bile gone?

Now for some lists.

People who aren’t nearly as funny as they think they are:

Mark Steel

Michael Moore

Dawn French

Almost all the ‘comedians’ in the 6.30 PM slot on Radio Four, really

Foot Eater

People who are funnier than they will ever know:

Chris Morris

Steve Coogan

Larry David

Emo Phillips

SafeTinspector

Swear words I will never use on this blog:

Times my finger has been poised over the Delete Blog button for more than five minutes:

Seven.

Occasions on which I have posted self-deprecating comments in an obvious trawl for self-validation:

Twenty-four.

Number of people I link to whose political views I share completely:

Zero.

Number of times the above has bothered me:

See previous answer.

End of lists. Coming up in the next few months: the Fenby saga will continue, and there’ll be more accounts of mistakes and misunderstandings, and probably more medical tales too. De-link now!

That’s it, that’s me for now; I’m off. See you all in a month or so. Behave.

The Misunderstanding

2006-07-15T01:01:00.000+09:00

Excerpt from the diary of former Defense Secretary J. Barleigh Korn, published posthumously by Apocalypso Press ($19.99)

January 19th

This morning I went to my briefin with the President and he looked all serius like. I aisked what was up but he dosnt like to be aisked questions, only to speak, so I let him talk cept I didnt realy lisen properly on acount of my disorder. At the end he gave me my instrutions for the day and I was a bit suprized but my job is to take the Presidents orders and not to aisk questions on acount of how hes like the Boss and all so I went away to do what he seid.

I went to my ofice and told Marcy my secetary to hold all my calls and I sat down at my desk. I dug some wax out my ears with my pen cos Momma seys its real importent to clean your ears reglarly or else you turn into a def asshole like my Daddy before he died, only sometimes I forget to what with havin so many importent things to think about at work all day long. I stuck the wax in the waistpaperbaskit only some of it stuck to the rim and I had to scrape it of with my pen and I realized I was waisting time and the President dosnt like that.

I made lots of fone calls and the people I spoke to didnt belive what I was seying but I hollered at them that it was the Presidents orders and did they want to anser to him personly and they seid no and I seid good cos if they cuoldnt folow orders then they cuold look for anuther job. Then I booted up my Appel Mac and got thru all the securitiy paswords and shit and punched in the priming codes and it kept given me meseges like WARNIN and DO YOU REALY WANT TO DO THIS but eventualy their was no more meseges and it seid LAUNCH? and I pushed ENTER.

Then some guys came in who I think were probly G-Men and they arested me and I seid why are you arestin me Im the defense secetary but they didnt sey shit and stuck me in a room. Then after maybe a half huor they came and took me to the Presidents ofice and staid with me. The President looked pised and also scared. He stared at me but didnt sey anythin for along time and I pointed at my nose.

- Youve got… I seid.

He rubbed some stuff off of his nostrel, it looked like the talcum powder Momma puts on her face when one of my new uncels is comin round to the trailer. Then he rememembered he was sposed to be pised with me.

- What in the Sam Hill have you just done boy, he hollered. He alweys calls me boy even tho Im 20 and so not a boy or even tecnicly a teenager anymore even.

- I was just folowin what you told me to do this mornin Mr President Sir, I seid.

- This mornin? he seid. This mornin I told you that your hearin dificulties was becomin a real problem and I advized you to consider a new career.

- O sory I seid, beginin to giggel. I thaught you told me to nuke Korea.

He stared at me agein all bug eyed like and then he started yellin an cursin about how he shuold never of hired a god dam Tennesee shit kicker like me but I cuoldnt help still giggelin and prety soon he was laughin too and so were the G-Men when they took me away agein. In fact it was infexious and the fierin squad was chucklin so hard they had to give up and theyre goin to try agein tomorrow. If theirs any of them left anyhow.