Tourist Guide to London Underground - 5 Essential Tube Rules

Tourists visiting London, first of all, let me just say – it’s not you, it’s us.

We sigh as you cluster around the entrance to a platform, perusing the tube map or just looking a bit lost.

We grumble as you block the left hand side of the escalator, denying us swift progress to wherever we’re going.

We mutter – and maybe even give you ‘a look’ – as you spend several days trying to figure out how to use the only functioning ticket machine on a morning when we just happen to be late for work.

You see, you’re not to blame, but you’re stopping us from getting to where we want to go a few minutes earlier than we otherwise would have! This is the SOLE AIM of any true Londoner – and you obstruct us at your peril!

Yes, we’re being unreasonable. We know that. But in order to foster better relations between you and us, I offer you a guide to using the London Underground network just like the natives.

RULE 1: You don’t HAVE to get on the train in the middle. You can move along and get in at either end too! Tube trains are quite long – as long as the platform, in fact. This appears to be something you’ve failed to figure out thus far. Admittedly this isn’t true of Circle Line trains – we’ve done that to catch you out just when you think you’re getting the hang of things.

RULE 2: Just to reiterate: Never, ever get in the way. Fine, so you want to stop and watch the really crap busker playing bongos he obviously rescued from a skip. Just do it against the bloody wall or something! Don’t you know we have SOMEWHERE VERY IMPORTANT TO GO and we need to be there NOW, NOW, NOW?

RULE 3: Don’t look aghast at the crumbling infrastructure and grime. It’s all stage-dressing to make the Americans feel they’re getting a proper ‘heritage’ experience and to fool Europeans into feeling superior.

RULE 4: For the love of god, don’t try to engage us in friendly conversation. We’ll just think you’re insane and recoil in fear. We British are simply too shy to make eye contact or talk to strangers. Until we go on holiday. Then we’re quite happy to dress as naughty nuns and drunkenly flash our genitals at anyone.

RULE 5: Don’t plan to go anywhere fast at weekends, as we shut down half the network to replace the Victorian steam-powered signals and Stone Age flint tracks. In fact, don’t plan to go anywhere fast during the week – our finely tuned, precision engineered trains break down more frequently than Ferraris – that’s the price you pay for such dream machines.

OK, that’s it. Before you visit, commit these simple rules to memory. After all, you wouldn’t want us to give you ‘a look’ would you?

Threadless and Luckless

My t-shirt submission to Threadless has been rejected! In their jaunty American way they tell me that "we feel your idea could use a little more work" and "we hope you take these decline reasons to heart and use them to rework your submission and resubmit" (if they were a creative director, I think they'd have said "it's shit, do it again"). Ah well, it's their loss etc...grumble...gripe...

Doktor Avalanche Threadless T-shirt Attempt

I've meant to do this for YEARS...

Threadless is a t-shirt site where budding fashion-fuhrers submit designs for generic male/female cotton under/work/youth garments and visitors to the site vote for their favourites. The design with most votes gets made into a t-shirt and sold. My effort is a bit shit, but I'm hoping that it's at least accepted to be put up for the vote. It is, of course a tribute to the pre-eminent rock drummer of the 80s - Doktor Avalanche, drum machine from the Sisters of Mercy.

Random Desktop

Here's where my mind took me in my lunch-hour. Analyse as you see fit and please use as a desktop (just click on the pic to see it full-size and right-click). Thank you to FFFFound and Skiffy for the original images.

What a Bastard

I’ve recently been reading a book about a ‘royal bastard’ – the illegitimate son of a Prince. He has a pretty rubbish time of it, with his origins used to abuse and shame him throughout the novel.

This seems to have awoken a certain amount of reflection on my part, as I’m a bastard myself (though lacking royal blood). Of course, I use this term provocatively. We live in an era where judgments about one’s birth are muted or, indeed, nonexistent entirely.

However, as the son of an unmarried, single mother in the 1970s, it was a source of deep shame and embarrassment to me. It’s not something I like to recall often. Not because anyone was particularly cruel, but because fear of being different drove me to tell some ridiculous lies. I’m now disappointed that I wasn’t stronger and proud of who I am.

I remember I only started to feel the need to lie when my mum and I moved to Leamington Spa from Manchester. I was seven at the time. We lived in a poor neighbourhood in Manchester, where there were several other single mothers and so it wasn’t an issue with other kids in my gang at school.

However, in Leamington Spa, it was all small-town values and nuclear families. I think, even at seven, I knew that a dead father is going to get a better response than one who’s just off the scene. So, as far as any of my new friends were concerned, my dad had died. He met his demise in various interesting ways, I seem to remember, but I think the most common version was a car crash.

The other lie was that my mum’s boyfriend at the time was my uncle. I didn’t realise at the time that this was a terrible cliché, I wish I had tired harder to be original (something like “my mum is in a bizarre tree-worshipping cult and that bearded man is her guru”).

Who knows? Perhaps I saved myself a whole heap of teasing. After all, children are vindictive little shits. One classmate, whose mum had polio, was relentlessly bullied and ridiculed. Because his mum was in a wheelchair! Jesus, the Ku Klux Klan has nothing on kids.

Ultimately, however pragmatic I was, I regret not being true to my mother and my real origins. The story of how I came into the world was never shameful and is, in many ways, more interesting than my lies. But that’s a tale for another post…

Random thoughts: Reception

A company’s reception area offers a big clue to its character. I’m sitting in one now. Beautiful minimalist décor and elegantly designed lighting, but receptionists who have spoken to me with a mixture of suspicion and irritation. Steel, grey and white. Modernist leather chairs that feel like Mies Van Der Rohe designed them whilst in a particularly sadistic mood. Counter-intuitive doors on the toilet that open the wrong way so they feel locked until you pull them.

It’s all semiotics. The body language of an entire company.

I’m considering what all this tells me and waiting for someone to collect me. That’s always an awfully apprehensive feeling when you have an interview. The hope of someone grabbing you quickly when you see people approach, then the anticlimax when they walk past, looking at you looking at them and knowing you’re waiting for an interview. One feels exposed and a little foolish.

I’m not here for an interview, however, so at least I can relax, feel my arse go numb in this torturous piece of furniture and look high-powered and dynamic by writing this on my laptop. It seems to me that we spend a great deal of our working life trying to look high-powered and dynamic when, in fact, we’re flawed and a bit foolish.

Or am I simply driven to introspection by this stripped-down corporate purgatory?

In Praise of Ish

I was thinking about what a great thing 'ish' is. In fact, I suppose I should say it's great-ish. Just by adding 3 letters to the end of a word, that word immediately becomes ambiguous and vague. Is it cold outside? No, its cold-ish. Will we meet at six? No, let's hook up around six-ish. Hungry? Well, I am a bit peckish, not to mention puckish in my occasional mischievousness.

I wonder whether this is something that's peculiar to the English language and hence betrays a very English desire to skate over anything that sounds definite? Emily, my French-speaking wife, suggests there isn't a French equivalent.

Do other languages have 'ish'?

I Might as Well Face It, I'm Addicted to GRRM: A Song of Ice and Fire

I’m a fanboy snob. I was one of the kids who had their minds blown by Star Wars in 1977. My favourite novels as a lad were Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion sagas. After such brainwashing, you’d therefore expect me to lap up any old fantasy or sci-fi crap, perhaps even getting the peroxide out and dressing up as Elric of Melniboné at fan conventions.

I am quite picky about what genre shit I consume, however. This is possibly why I managed to miss out on the gargantuan talents of George RR Martin (or GRRM as his fans call him). The name didn’t inspire confidence, I guess. Anyway, after coming across a discussion of his stuff on Amazon, I decided to buy the first of his ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series, ‘A Game of Thrones’. Now I’m completely addicted – I spent yesterday anxious awaiting the arrival of the third novel in the series like a crack whore awaiting a rock.

The book is primarily set in the fictional realm of the Seven Kingdoms. The world is at a medieval level of development, so no surprises there: you have knights, castles and all the usual feudal gubbins. The plot charts the realm’s rapid descent into a great big civil war that makes the War of the Roses look like an episode of Gladiators. On top of this strife, a decade long winter is descending and sinister forces are gathering in the north...

When I began reading it, I wasn’t very hopeful. I’m not a fan of the cod-mediaeval stuff, so the setting seemed a little tired. However, I liked the multiple viewpoint chapter structure, with the potential for irony as different characters address the same events through their own lens. And, as I read more, the writing seemed richer and standard fantasy trappings became subverted and, frankly, brutalised. It starts as Ivanhoe and ends as 120 Days of Sodom.

Primary protagonists die. Moral lines become blurred. The plot shifts in unexpected ways. The mediaeval setting becomes darker, characterised by violence against the poor by those with power (rape, pillage, massacre, torture, all perpetrated by ‘honourable’ knights). I love that stuff in novels – having my expectations messed with. Even fantasy stories become far more immersive when they reflect the random chaos of the real world.

There are also lovely touches of good descriptive writing – all rooted in earthy nature, as is right from a medieval perspective. The other thing that reflects a mediaeval context is 14-year-old girls being married off and having sex, which has caused a certain amount of censure from concerned citizens on Amazon. I strongly doubt GRRM is a paedophile, but he does seem to be obsessed with children surviving the brutality of the world and becoming adults before their time.

Anyway, I’m now a big geeky GRRM fan and it’s great that he is still alive, churning these epic books out. Long may the addiction continue…

File Under 'People Are Shit': Chat Magazine

It’s not often that queuing in Sainsbury's and hangings at Tyburn come together in my head, but that’s exactly what happened to me the other day. While waiting to pay for some banal everyday items, I stood behind a woman who had Chat magazine in her basket.

‘Chat’ sounds like a pretty harmless publication aimed at elderly ladies who also dig the People’s Friend. However, when I looked closer I saw that Chat’s strapline is ‘Life! Death! Prizes!’ (I haven’t added the exclamation marks, Chat magazine really is screaming those words at you). It’s a novel variation on the classic ‘life, death, taxes’ trope and no doubt was focus group-tested to, er, death to reflect the interests of its lovely readers. I like the order of priority too – prizes obviously comes narrowly behind death in the Chat reader’s all-time top 3 of things they want to read about.

I was really taken aback – wow, that’s a bit brazen, I thought. No beating around the bush there! Then I read the cover stories (there’s a lot of elderly people at our local supermarket – one has time to take things in). I’ll just bullet list them because they’re all so totally wrong in every possible way:

• Why we TATTOOED our quads
• Kicked to death…for calling this brute HONEY BUNNY
• I had 10 PINTS of fat sucked out!!!
• PRONGS OF DEATH! Killed with a pitchfork
• My lovely wedding dress saved my life!
• The steamy sex life of MURDERING MARTHA…

Is it just me, or is Chat magazine reducing personal tragedy to sick morbid entertainment for the kind of women who would have been knitting in front of the guillotine during the French revolution? Am I naive to be offended?

Which brings me to the crowds that turned up for hangings at Tyburn. When we look back at our history, we are often shocked by the cheery savagery of the populace turning someone’s death into a day out. But have we really moved on? I genuinely believe that Chat magazine readers would love a few public executions. They’d be there with their camera phones, giggling as some poor fucker kicked air.

The Sony S-Series, Amazon and Apple Music Experience: It's the Software, Stupid.

I spent yesterday grappling with new things in digital music today. I bought a Sony S-Series Walkman (the memorably named NWZ-S638F) AND downloaded music from Amazon. Totally out of my iPod/iTunes comfort zone. And like anyone in new territory, I'm still navigating nervously.

I've been entirely loyal to the Apple iPod and iTunes in all my dealings with digital music. Along with millions of others, the convenience of automatic sync and the familiarity of the interface have kept me in the Apple fold for years. However, there's one problem with the iPod.

It sounds shit.

I've tried various headphones, the different EQ settings, changing the quality of the music files and so on, but it still sounds tinny and thin. So, having read about the brilliant sound offered by Sony music players, I thought - fuck it - let's take a punt.

Does S-Series Stand For 'Software Sucks'?

First impressions weren't good. Sony supply no software for Macs, so you drag and drop the music you want from iTunes to the player on your desktop. It can't handle playlists (which is annoying, as I love my playlists) and there are naming issues with some files. Altogether pretty poor.

However, once the music is on the Walkman, the interface is simple enough and my music sounds bloody amazing. It's like going from mono to stereo. I wandered around WGC for an hour just listening and loving it. So, result for Sony there. It makes the crappy lack of sync worth putting up with - just about.

As a PS3 - and now Walkman - owner, it's clear to me why Sony are in trouble. It's software. Sony is woefully lagging in this area (hence this painfully on-target spoof by the Onion: http://bit.ly/2gQCZI).

Up the Amazon MP3 Store Without a Paddle

My other experiment was buying digital music from Amazon. This wasn't frustrating like the Sony experience, just scary. You install a little download app and pay as usual, but then nothing appears to suggest that the music download is actually happening. After a brief moment of panic, I had to find the app in Finder and open it to see that - thank fuck - the music I bought is actually downloading and going into my iTunes library. And it seems to download the same tracks twice, which is odd (maybe back-up files?). Anyway, the lovely straightforwardness of iTunes wins out again - not sure I'll buy from Amazon again, frankly, despite some music being slightly cheaper.

So, in conclusion, it's easy to see why iTunes - the simplicity and seamlessness - makes Apple market leader, despite price and even sound quality. Time companies with superior hardware, like Sony, or pricing, like Amazon, developed the user experience to match.

Tweet mother of god: Celebrities on Twitter

The new source of cheap showbiz stories in the tabloid newspapers is Twitter. Why? Because celebrities – particularly Jonathan Ross (@Wossy) and Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) have decamped there (and, in Alan Carr’s case, camped it up there). All a hack has to do is follow their Tweets and they have an endless stream of title-tattle.

I only caught on a few weeks ago after using the Mr Tweet service to extend my Twitter network and it suggested I follow a Guardian technology journalist, Charles Arthur (@charlesarthur) who follows @Wossy (sorry to non-tweeters – Twitter has its own arcane argot).

I don’t know how I feel about celebrity tweeting. Not because I mind famous people doing it – Alan Carr’s tweets, for instance, are laugh-out -loud funny. No, what makes me cringe is the sheer amount of brown-nosing and ‘pay attention to me, me, me’ messaging from less exalted tweeters. There’s something a bit undignified about this. I guess it’s feeding celebrity egos, which always need a lot of sustenance, but its demeaning for the non-celebrities – like kids trying to get the attention of a distant parent who will never love them.

The biggest culprit on my follow list is one journalist (I shan’t name names) who seems to spend most of his working day trying to engage Jonathan Ross in tweet conversation. Give it up mate, he’s not going to write a column for you and 6000 other nobodies are trying to grab his attention.

One final argument against celebrities on Twitter: here’s a picture of Eddie Izzard in a fleece. It’s a bit like seeing Madonna in surgical stockings...

Don Draper’s Guide to Making It in Advertising

Having just caught up with the wonder that is Mad Men on DVD, I have a new role model: Don Draper, Creative Director at ‘60s Madison Avenue agency Sterling Cooper. Without giving away too much about this brilliant series to the uninitiated, here’s Don’s approach to a successful career in adland…

1. Get drunk. Stay drunk.
They say that a relaxed mind is a creative mind – and what better way to stay relaxed than to be pissed on whiskey from the start of the day to when you crawl into bed with your beautiful but soulless wife (or anyone else who takes your fancy(see point 2))? Keep that drinks cabinet in the office well stocked – you never know when you might need some extra ‘inspiration’!

2. Fuck around
Shagging intelligent independent women might assuage your empty marriage and banging the client may even bring in more business!

3. Smoke like a chimney
Everyone loves to smoke; it’s an essential component of the American dream. It’s an especially useful habit if your client is Lucky Strike – live the brand, then die of lung cancer.

4. Take a nap
No ideas? Lie down on that sofa in your quiet corner office and get 40 winks. Who knows what may occur to you in your reverie?

5. Find a loyal secretary
All that drinking, philandering and sleeping needs good cover. Your secretary is both gatekeeper and organiser. Loyalty will be particularly encouraged by sexist remarks and condescension.

6. Keep 10 clean shirts in a drawer in your desk
A good creative looks like Cary Grant after a 8 hours in a trouser press. So wherever you’ve been the night before (see point 2 again), keep a fresh shirt handy.

7. Keep those skeletons in the closet
Got a shady, mysterious past that you don’t want to share? Great! Not only does it add an enigmatic air, it may offer an unexpected coup de grace when agency rivals try to blackmail you.

So there you have it – Don Draper’s approach may seem a little dated, but I reckon it could work for you! Why not give it a go?

Taking a Big Bite of Apple

Sorry about the recent lack of blog, dear reader. Simon and I have started working on the Apple account and this has taken up all my brain-space. Even though we’re both consumers of the brand, it’s an interesting challenge to get under the skin of what’s right for it creatively.

Apple’s creative philosophy, as articulated all over the walls at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, is ‘simplify,, simplify, simplify’. Now this, as I’m discovering, effectively summarises the challenge of picking up this revered brand in a number of ways.

It seems that Apple advertising is easy (sexy product shot and a clever line), there’s a lot of nuance within that and it’s bloody hard to get simplicity right.

As a copywriter, you’re often asked to cover off all possible marketing messages in a line. It’s a real skill to get straight to the heart of the proposition in a minimum number of words. I remember James Hilton, a Creative director at AKQA, telling me that writing copy for Nike was a matter of starting with a statement, halving the number of words, then halving it again. It’s similar with Apple. Typically it’s boiling down what’s brilliant about a product in 4 playful words or less. And those playful words must translate into 19 languages.

It’s a tough one for an art director too. Doing something fresh within a very tight visual framework is incredibly challenging. We know that a lot of the ideas we’re coming up with are wrong, but we’re following them through to their logical conclusion to figure out why and identify the bits that are right. It’s an iterative process and I feel that I’m sharpening my creative skills as I go.

After a few weeks on the brand, we hope that we’re feeling our way towards the essence of Apple in our work. I’m beginning to think that after a few hundred concepts we’ll enter a zen state where we’re getting it right with less of a struggle. I’ll keep you posted…

Ray Durgnat Remembered

I’ll always have fond memories of my film theory lectures at the University of East London. The promise of watching cool French New Wave movies had me eagerly scampering through the less-than-lovely environs of Plaistow to the art dept. at Greengate every Wednesday.

Most of all I used to love listening to the lecturer waxing lyrical about the revolutionary days of the 1960s, where films were not merely entertainment, but weapons that would bring down capitalism and replace it with some kind of Maoist utopia.

His name was Ray Durgnat (we called him Ray Donut of course - oh, what wits). He was a slightly shambolic, eccentric little guy in big horn-rimmed glasses and a beard. He wasn’t particularly charismatic or forceful, but his knowledge of film had me captivated.

He hung out with Jean-Luc Godard when radicalism was at its height – and Paris was briefly convulsed by glorious anarchy - in 1968. His anecdotes from the period were full of wry observation, but he never traded on them like some would.

And I just found out that he died. Six years ago.

So I’m a bit late with this, but Ray Durgant I salute you. Your books on Godard and the Nouvelle Vague (which I found accidentally in Scoob Books) are bloody great and I loved your lectures.

Here’s Ray’s obituary for those interested in this modest, brilliant man

Dip Into Blip.fm

I wrote about last.fm a while ago, after a bit of a fiddle with that particular music community site. They’ve improved the interface a bit, but I never got hooked on it. I am, however, now totally addicted to blip.fm.

The best way I think of describing blip.fm is that it’s like twitter with songs. You can search a huge database of songs, play them and ‘blip’ them – share them with other people on the site along with a pithy comment. So instead of sharing tweets, you’re sharing songs. You are the DJ.

You can select favourite DJs to join your ‘song stream’ or just listen to what everyone around the world is listening to. It’s really, really cool.

The other great thing about it is that it’s stupidly easy to export a link to a song into Twitter or Facebook.

If you haven’t given blip.fm a go, then hop over there now. I’m MysticTris if you want to hear what I’m playing on the ‘wheels of steel’. I’ve adopted the persona of a Terry-Thomas character circa 1955. I’m not really sure why…

Justified Ancient Records of Mu Mu

Continuing on my musical nostalgia trip this weekend I alighted in the lost land of the Mu-Mu. I dug out the White Room by the KLF, otherwise known as the JAMS or the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. I’d forgotten just what fucking brilliant ideas they threw at an unsuspecting listening public in the early '90s.

Combining situationist pranks, a self-referencing mythos based on the Iluminatus! Trilogy, massive irony and epic videos, the KLF are the kind of act that I can’t imagine getting into the charts now. I listened to their collaboration with Tammy Wynette, ‘Justified and Ancient’, with my elder two kids the other day and the joyful whimsy of lyrics had them giggling– particularly ‘they're Justified and they're ancient, and they drive an ice cream van’.

Afterwards I was depressed by watching the ’50 biggest selling singles in the last 10 years’ on 4Music. Will Young was at number one and the top 50 was littered with X-Factor singles, like budgie shit at the bottom of music’s misery cage. How depressing that more acts with the KLF’s imagination and playfulness haven’t appeared in the mainstream since they retired to burn money.

Pipes of Shit

After reminiscing about one classic album I loved and lost, it’s time to confess to one that I loved and have no desire to rediscover. In fact, I am now terribly, horrifically embarrassed that I owned it. It’s aural equivalent to admitting that I once spent good money on pig excrement and adored smearing it over myself in my bedroom.

Yes, my old friend Steve has blog-tagged me again. This time the challenge is: name your most embarrassing record ever!

Well, I’ll cut straight to the chase. I once bought and enjoyed ‘Pipes of Peace’ by Paul McCartney (or ‘Fab Macca Thumbs Aloft’ as Smash Hits called him at the time). Not just the single, but the whole bloomin’ album. I think I was 13 at the time. I’d done well up ‘til then, with a diet of ska and stuff like Buggles, so I still can’t figure out why I lapsed so badly. Since I vaguely remember having a weakness for Billy Joel shortly afterwards, the paucity of taste continued with worrying regularity.

I suppose my current guilty pleasure on the iPod is a smattering of ELO. But, come on, Mr Blue Sky is rock genius…

So, Paul, when can I meet the kids?

A Nostalgic Ramble on the Subject of Renaissance: the Mix Collection by Sasha & John Digweed

I had Goosebumps this morning. And they weren’t caused by the chill November winds. After searching for ages, I finally tracked down a copy of Renaissance: the Mix Collection by Sasha & John Digweed. This was the soundtrack to my rave era back in ‘94 and ‘95. As soon as I listened to the opener – ‘The Song of Life’ by Leftfield – I was transported back to a time when I could wear a fluorescent lime green t-shirt, dance for 8 hours solid and not feel like a twat or, indeed, a knackered twat. It was a time in my life marked by Ecstasy, wind machines and deafness.

Although I went to raves before then, I first took E at a Megadog at the Rocket, Holloway. It was revelatory. It was liberating for someone as buttoned down and English as me to just go nuts on the dance-floor and make instant friends with complete strangers.

At no other moment in my life, for instance, can I imagine dancing frenetically with a topless scarified S&M freak with chains hanging from his pierced nipples. In fact, I must have looked freakier than my new pal because the security guards kept bringing me cups of water. I thought they were being lovely and kind, but a friend pointed out afterwards that they were worried I was going to collapse from dehydration.

Before that E, I could take or leave dance music. I was still into Blur, Nick Cave and indie in general. Afterwards, however, my brain was entirely rewired.

I suddenly ‘got’ house. I could see how the music fed the experience – that you needed E for it to get its hooks into you. The music brought on the rush and the rush informed the music. The best moment of a club night for me was when the music was banging away, then suddenly paused; the wind machines came on; everyone stopped dancing and stood with their hands in the air; then the beat would slowly build again, my rush building at the same time. Then the music would kick in and everyone would go mental. It was genuinely as good as sex.

Then, in someone’s front room on a Sunday morning, we’d share a spliff and listen to the Renaissance Mix Collection. Then I got it on tape and listened to it EVERYWHERE. Just trying to replicate a little bit of that high from the Saturday night before (especially on Wednesday when my comedown would hit rock bottom).

As you can imagine, listening to it for the first time in 10 years, even as I walked through Welwyn Garden City, gave me a real high. I’m just hoping the comedown won’t be quite so savage.



Footnote: Of course the downside of ecstasy is memory loss - it literally took me 30 minutes to drag the word 'Megadog' from my addled brain just now. And that was a watershed night in my life!

Come, Friendly Bombs...

Is it wrong to want to call in an airstrike against the River Cottage? This is a rhetorical question of course, as the answer is undoubtedly ‘no’. Having watched River Cottage Autumn last night, it seems like a far better use of military resources than bombing innocent Afghan villagers.

Obviously SAS observers in the hills over the enemy base would have make sure that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was on site, perhaps being fellated by one of his rare breed pigs.

Mind you, who’d need the SAS? I’m sure the locals in neighbouring Axminster would be quite happy to shop the overbearing Old Etonian be-jerkined satchel-mouthed tosspot to anyone willing to put an end to his wholefood tyrannical rule of their town. Yes folks, it’s time for ‘regime change’ in Spermy-Shittingstool’s manor.

Last night we saw him bullying poor people into acting as his serfs on an allotment and patronisingly force-feeding them the vegetables from it. He then browbeat his pet baker into making rolls made from spelt for his ‘vegetable’ themed night in another offshoot of his empire, the River Cottage Local.

A vague sense of drama was generated by the uncertainty over whether the spelt rolls would be ready in time. You’ll glad to know that they were. If they hadn’t been, I’m sure Lord Cocking-Fittingtool would have had the blighter soundly flogged (with a cat’o’ninetails made from the same organic leather as his jerkin).

So, OK, carpet-bombing River Cottage may be overly ambitious, but I’m surprised a resident of Axminster hasn’t already set a roadside bomb to obliterate Hugh’s ostentatiously rustic Land Rover. Now that’s one jihadi video I’d want to see…

Six Me, Me, Me Facts

My old friend Steve has passed on a 'blog-tag' which challenges me to tell the world 6 random things about myself. Since there's no subject I'd like to write about more than myself, this has prodded me into blogging despite work busy-ness:

1. Stirling Moss was my landlord for a while. He was a right stingy old git. When I moved out of the modest bedsit in West Kensington, he took £50 off my deposit for a lost teacup and some scuffed paint. After haggling over this for 10 minutes, he wrote the cheque for my deposit using a Coutts chequebook.
2. I have a fantasy about what I’d wish for if I met a genie. The wish I’ve thought out in most detail is this: duplicating the Earth in an equivalent orbit on the other side of the sun and populating it with friends and family. A fresh start for the planet and an amazing adventure for everyone I know. Obviously it could be really shit if we starve to death before figuring out how to grow food and, admittedly, friends and family might not be up for a Ray Mears-style survivalist paradise…
3. I once shared a flat in Finsbury Park with a member of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. They were very big in Japan, apparently.
4. My left foot is half a size larger than my right foot. This is a common thing, which has led me to suspect that there’s a business idea in selling shoes individually rather than in pairs.
5. I used to cry at old Bette Davies weepies as a child – and yet, miraculously, I’m not gay!
6. My cholesterol level (score, rating or whatever you call it) is 9 – which is rather high according to my doctor. Sob, no more steak for me!