I stood in a queue at the express checkout of our local supermarket yesterday for over fifteen minutes trying to stay calm, whilst my fingers froze on a packet of mixed veg. A ragged couple in their seventies were responsible for the queue stalling, and why? They were buying nothing of nutritional or medicinal value, but were painstakingly cashing in what appeared to be a lifetime’s worth of lottery tickets. In total they must have pulled out over twenty screwed up tickets, each yielding precisely zilch. They looked disappointed, almost shocked and I felt that this deluded couple really did expect to win millions. The man appeared to age in seconds as if just having been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was somehow trying to apologise to his wife. The man then ripped open his wallet and looked up at the plastic scratch card dispenser baffled at the choice. His grubby finger hovered over the display as he selected several cards before parting with £20. He grabbed the cards like a junkie and disappeared from the queue like a frenzied fox that had just snared a rabbit. By the time I reached the counter my frozen mixed veg had begun to thaw. It then occurred to me that newsagents, supermarkets and petrol stations had turned into mini casinos, satisfying the addictions of desperate, financially unstable people. Camelot play their role in ensuring that the poor remain poor and the rich become ricer by enforcing an unfair tax collection system. We are misled into believing we play lotto games for their entertainment value, but that’s horse shit, we play because we are addicted, we have become desperate.
The old man’s haunted face stayed with me for the rest of the day, I felt I needed to apportion blame and I naturally thought of Camelot. Their national lottery business is doing roaring trade in today’s depressed climate, in face they appear to be doing a magnificent job as the government’s unofficial tax collector. Camelot uses state of the art marketing techniques to sell the idea of becoming rich beyond our wildest dreams using plenty of bright colours and flashy smiles on the TV, Internet and advertising boards, and it works because we have all fallen into their flytrap.
I’ve only just checked out Camelot’s national lottery website, it’s a gambling addict’s paradise. There’s such a selection of games to chose from, treasure & TV show games, board & dice games, arcade & word games, and they all promise you the chance of winning £100,000, and all with a £2 stake, and it got me thinking about the odds. I checked them out and they are frighteningly biased towards Camelot. The bigger lotto wins offer even more horrendous odds, but we step willingly into their flytrap.
Only a small percentage of Camelot takings go towards funding projects, but this is only tokenism on a large scale, the large percentage of takings go towards topping up government coffers to fund global policies and lining the pockets of all the senior administrators involved. It’s also alarming how this aspect of gambling has become normalised, expected, demanded. Placing a bet on a horse is still frowned upon as being the action of a despicable gambler who is probably an alcoholic and a wife beater. Sadly as a mass we are financially unprincipled and can’t resist the chance, regardless of whether the odds are stacked heavily against us, to win cash, I know that my will power has withered over the years.
I am even more convinced now that there are no lotto millions winners, the winning is a fabrication of the truth, a scam, a cover up, a conspiracy. I’ve never met anyone who’s won the jackpot neither do I know anyone who has every met anyone who has won millions either. It’s always the case of an apologetic ‘oh they are out there because I know someone who knows of a big winner’, which is hardly proof. Newspaper reports can also be discarded as evidence as well, because they can be easily fabricated. If Ridley Scott can digitally recreate the Colosseum in Rome then I’m sure Camelot could access the technical resources to create lotto millionnaires. The next time you stare at an image of a lotto millionaire, remember they are not real, they have been digitally created, they did it with Oliver Reed in Gladiator!
Treated myself to a low fat muffin and tea at Costa’s in Cambridge recently and sat back to flick through C J Sansom’s Heartstone, but only got as far as the dustcover when a couple approached and sat at the table to my left. The tall woman in jeans and cropped black hair was plainly anorexic, her friend reminded me of Fern Britton before the weight loss. The anorexic friend must have been a comic genius because with every deadpan whisper, I could barely make out her words, Fern Britton broke out into hysterical laughter. I slammed C J Sansom down, gripped my temples, and waited for the migraine, the cackle continued.
After a while Fern Britton stood, rubbed the crumbs off her blouse and announced to everyone in Costa’s that she was off for a pee. She returned several minutes later, flushed. Their subsequent exchange cauterised my migraine.
‘Cath, You OK? You’ve gone red.’
‘That’s nothing, it’s my period (Cath chuckled, at what I had no idea), I’m all mucky right now (I spat out a mouthful of muffin into my hand, I could eat no more for the rest of the day). I just keep on getting these hot flushes.’
‘You should go and see Dr Kumber, maybe he can give you something.’
‘Maybe a good seeing to (Cath found this hysterical and was reduced to tears, I felt like vomiting).’
‘You can forget that, Asian men tend to be pretty loyal.’
‘I could always use my charm (charm? Jesus you are gross, woman), anyway this place is goin’ down hill, they’ve even run out of soddin’ paper in the loo (I waited, gripped, for the punchline, because there had to be a punchline).’
‘Well?’
‘So I stood there like, looking around, saw my belly in the mirror and thought you have to shift some weight love then I looked in my purse (I was intrigued to say the least).’
‘What for?’
‘I pulled out a Tesco till receipt, did over £100 worth of shopping last week, so wiped myself with that, bloody handy I thought (and I thought ‘bloody’ being the operative word. I was thoroughly repulsed).’
‘God Cath, that’s gross!’
‘Maybe (fucking definitely I’d say), but I also came out with no pads so I had to whip the used one back on me under carriage (Cath chuckled, she found this last statement amusing, I shared her friend’s disgust).’
‘Anyway you know I’ve got an overactive bladder and I have to go whenever I get the urge (I had uncomfortable images of Cath pissing in the middle of supermarkets, in cinema foyers, up against a tree in parks and by shop windows on high streets), so I never chuck out till receipts, you never know when they’ll come in handy (Jesus, what a gross creature, couldn’t she just carry tissues around with her, like normal people?).’
‘Well you need to get yourself checked out (if I was Dr Kumber I would insist on Cath being hosed down after being defumigated first before any examination).’
There conversation drifted off into how best to cook a leek and potato soup and I just lost interest, to be honest I felt faint. I had also lost interest in eating the remainder of the muffin, and ate little for the next few days. I left as Cath asked her friend whether a leek could be eaten raw like a spring onion, says it all really.
There is nothing more irritating, and I find this happens a lot at Starbucks, when you order a grande tea, for anyone living in the North this is the medium 16oz mug and pronounced ‘grawn-day’, the tea bag string is strapped tightly around the handle of the mug. By the time you’ve reached ‘help yourself’ counter you have wasted the best part of your drink trying to rip the bag off the handle and in the process scolding your hand. I’m too much of a coward to complain especially when the Latvian barista offers you the drink as if it was a trophy, presents a strained grin and implores you to ‘enjoy’.
Nursing several burnt fingers earlier this morning I was intrigued by this smartly dressed man in his fifties, who almost certainly held down a junior management job for one of the local banks, I think it must have been the company aftershave. I was intrigued by his mutterings as he fiddled with his Blackberry. With considerable eye straining I gleamed that he had just set up a Twitter account. His first tweet was ‘hey Bruno, I’ve just signed up to Twitter’. I know this because this fifty year old dick called Bruno moments later and spoke to Bruno and informed him that the tweet had been sent, in a state of euphoria this dick implored Bruno to watch out for this and ‘future tweets but not for a few hours because he had some work to do (thank fuck for that), and for the record, fifty year old men should not begin any sentences with the word ‘hey’, its on a par with necrophilia.
The Twitter dick got me thinking, I know that Twitter gets on my tits, but I needed to work out why, and with a mug of lukewarm tea for company I spent ten minutes internalising a rant. Everyone seems to be blabbering on about Twitter these days, it’s so irritating, tweeting (I cringe just typing out the word, in fact I feel aggression festering) is on a par with standing on a rooftop screaming out nonsensical one-liners that no one has any interest in, put simply no one gives a chicken shit. It’s designed for self-important nonentities and celebrities (such as Richard Madeley, why?). You also have to learn stupid codes to use Twitter, even to do simple things like ‘reply’ and ‘quote’, why not programme in buttons, so much easier.
I’m pretty sure Twitter is bandied about as a social networking site but little conversation takes place because the character limit discourages any creativity. Essentially Twitter is a soapbox where the author attempts to promote an image of monumental coolness and fails miserably.
What truly makes Twitter shit is the people that use it. Tweeting mundane stuff like describing the food you have just eaten or that you plan to fart shortly is painful and should be replaced with more useful pastimes like placing the nozzle of a handgun into your mouth and counting slowly to ten, anything but posting tweets. The thought that there are people out there that genuinely believe that we are interested in their mundane lives is shocking, however we continue to accept this constant vomit of pointless useless information.
Twitter shields a darker side, it harbours the disintegration of privacy. It encourages the need to expose everything to the public on a daily basis. People have become extensions of today’s technology, inextricably drawn to its machinations. We’ve lost the ability to communicate normally with living people.
I have to continue with the rant. There is a technological dependence. People Facebooking (you see it’s become a verb in the Present Continuous tense) on laptops and Iphones in coffee shops, checking their email on Blackberrys as they walk through shopping centres and when travelling, either standing, walking or sitting, wired up to iPods, and of course there’s the constant texting. Yes, privacy has disintegrated, and I haven’t even got into the political implications.
And there is a big point here isn’t there? It’s just that we don’t give a shit, we just carry on churning out the bilious inanities regardless, and maybe I don’t give a shit either because I stress more about a tangled stringed teabag.
Was enjoying a healthy experience in Starbucks a few days ago, the type involving a camomile blend of which the contents of the bag would not have been out of place in a Rizzla, and a low fat yogurt, the type where you are invited to share the thrill in peeling back a strip of foil and then watch helplessly as granola cereal freefalls on to your lap.
My meditation was then rudely interrupted by Pamela and Ruby; the latter being a suffering mother-in-law who was constantly reminded of her name, the former, a gross creature. Pamela bundled in to Starbucks with seven Sainsbury’s bags of food shopping; I counted them as they thudded onto a sofa. Pamela huffed and puffed as sweat dripped from her blubber. She then roared out at Ruby to ‘park her arse’, (Harlow I thought straightaway), onto the seat next to ‘that man in black’.
Ruby, a slim, demure woman, probably in her sixties, obeyed with little resistance whilst Pamela stood close by scratching her considerable belly. She wore one of those elasticised skirts designed for obese women, the type to fit all sizes above a certain level on the BMI. Pamela continued to roar to my alarm: ‘I’ve been eating like a horse all day but I’m still starving Ruby, I dunno what’s wrong with me (you are a pig Pamela that’s what’s wrong, it’s not complicated), what about you love? Oh I know what to get you, my god it’s so boiling hot in here, it must be my hoemones’, at this point I stopped enjoying my healthy experience.
With Pamela jockeying for position at the counter, and attracting considerable attention, Ruby looked at me and smiled, I looked away confused and quickly responded to an imaginary text message on my Iphone. Distracted now by the gross Pamela I couldn’t help but notice the lifestyle hiding in the tops of her shopping bags: unbranded ice-cream, lots of, chocolate, frozen dinners, pizzas, cakes, frozen chips and more chocolate. Looking up I caught Ruby fiddling with her dentures, and then Pamela returned.
‘Ruby, a treat, look,’ Ruby could have been a cocker spaniel. ‘It’s a chocolate cookie and some tea’. The tray trembled in her hands; it was the weight of the cakes. She bent forward to reveal a ghastly cleavage, it reminded me oddly of several scenes from Saw. Pamela then dropped onto her seat, wiped her dripping face with her forearm, scratched her belly once again, the thought of her rash sent bile shooting to the roof of my mouth, then blew in my direction before staring at her breakfast.
The wedge of carrot cake was disposed of with very little effort, I counted three bites although I’m not sure whether her teeth made any contact with the cake, it was as if the carrot cake was simply absorbed. ‘God that was moist belched Ruby. You know love, I’m so fat now, one more cake won’t matter’. Sweat continued to dribble into her cleavage as she slurped back her chocolate milkshake, Ruby nibbled at her cookie.
I was late for work so had to leave before my breakfast company could depart but as I hovered over Pamela I noticed she had started to tease the edge of her cinnamon danish swirl, she had reached a feverish state and was not about to resist.
Six nights in the Holiday Inn on Victor Hugo Boulevard in Nice just before Christmas was perfect, arranging it so that the last two nights were spent alone was not only selfish, but a plan that was to backfire on me.
I discovered a trendy little café in the old town were I could drink perfectly mixed Black Russian cocktails whilst propping up the bar. I also looked splendid in skinny jeans, cowboy boots, a dark shirt and a chain linking my new French leather wallet to my jeans. I had no intention of getting drunk and neither was I keen on company for the night.
A Scouser in his fifties soon started chatting to me, curious as to what was in my cocktail. The alarm bells should have, but weren’t raised when he asked to have a taste. It’s not in my character to have said ‘no, piss off’, so I allowed him a taste. As I was about to leave, David, I discovered his name two and a half hours later, insisted very persuasively, on buying me a drink. David was a Nautical Interior Designer, and apparently worked on several of the billion dollar yachts in the harbour, I was impressed by his grandeur. He was spending a few days taking in the sights with a friend and was pleasant enough and I vaguely remember talking about Francis Bacon. Several Black Russians later we were joined by Eugene, David’s friend, the name should have been enough to sound another alarm bell, but it didn’t, and when it did it was too late. Eugene was probably twenty years younger than David, estranged from his family in Florida, very hyper, and from the state of his flaring nostrils, most definitely high on cocaine.
Another Black Russian and several beers later David announced that Eugene had been his lover for the past six months, and was the best fuck he had ever had. It had taken me over two hours to realise that they were gay, not a problem in itself, but as I looked around a still quite busy café, I realised that I wasn’t alone in being stunned by the announcement, my worry was that they too were concluding that I was willing to be picked up by a couple of guys. I instinctively felt for my chain and instantly regretted fiddling around with it in the hotel lobby trying to hook it onto my jeans.
David was getting camper by the minute, Eugene, still stoned, kept fiddling with his groin, he was pleased that he had my attention. As midnight struck they invited me back to their yacht, a series of lame excuses then followed including something about being tired and that I needed to get back to the Holiday Inn. I realised this boast was a massive mistake but the words just fell out and by then they had both grabbed my elbows and insisted on partying back at my hotel. Disturbing images of being in bed with two naked men rampaged through my very bleary head.
By the time we reached the front door we had compromised by going to another bar in the old town, one populated by locals who were not particularly welcoming. When I returned from the toilet, where I spent some time composing myself and planning an exit strategy, David and Eugene were arguing, Jeremy Kyle style. David accused Eugene of being a bitch slut then suggested we all go back to the yacht, I could only think about sprinting back to the Holiday Inn and risking a heart attack. Eugene then insisted that I try on his cap, it was then that I realised he was completely bald but to humour him I obliged. He then complimented me by saying I looked cute, I pathetically tried to catch my reflection in the enormous mirror opposite but was then stunned when he asked how big my cock was. It was too late for alarm bells, what could I say? The truth? Exaggerate? I settled for something ridiculous like ‘big enough!’
Another argument followed, David insisting that Eugene had been screwing around with a Filipino boy. I had to get away. What happened next was spectacular. David picked up a full pint of Stella and poured it slowly over Eugene’s cap, the cap was no longer on my head, but on Eugene’s, I sat back and waited for the inevitable brawl to commence. Eugene however threw his chair back, squared up to David, called him a ‘camel’s cunt’, slapped him hard against the cheek and then charged out of a stunned bar.
It was now 2am, I also left the bar minutes later, with a dazed David ignoring my puny farewells, but I only had one thing on my mind, the Holiday Inn, and they both knew where I was staying. It was then that I realised I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime and I was hungry. To kill time I bought a greasy pizza and shiftily made my way back along a deserted Victor Hugo Boulevard, the pizza lasting only one bite. I half expected David and Eugene to pounce on me in the hotel’s lobby but was relieved to find only a dozing night porter. Back in the hotel bedroom I managed to bring my breathing back to normal and soon fell asleep watching a dubbed version of Clint Eastwood’s Magnum Force.
Growing up in the 70s with punk, new wave & ska I jostled with many skinheads in various pubs and clubs, many are now looking forward to retirement after lucrative careers in commercial banking and global marketing. The rest remain, and will always remain skinheads and will often be found in Wetherspoons, heads glistening, flexing withered tattoos, still looking hard and to be honest, succeeding.
The two I watched, from a very safe distance, were clearly psychopathic. The Bright Helm Wetherspoons in Brighton was the perfect setting for a pair of shaven headed thugs who oddly resembled the Kray twins without the suits and hair; instead they both sported Dr Martens, Harrington jackets and Sta-Prest trousers. It’s possible they were gay, but they were clearly having an argument over a portion of ‘fucking chips’ that was surplus to requirements. ‘I’m not gonna touch those fuckin’ chips, coz I didn’t order them, you did, so eat them, or else.’ This was menacing, throbbing vein in temple neck straining venomous stuff. They settled after a while then to demonstrate impeccable manners they grabbed at their cutlery and with hunched shoulders they attacked their all day breakfast, and extra portion of chips. I’ve seen Scum, and these thugs could have been extras in the prison canteen scene, for certain though they would have done time in Wormwood Scrubs. It was the Union Jack tattooed on one of the Kray twins, just below the ear, that scared me the most. This was slightly less alarming than the Maltese Cross tattooed on the nape of the neck of the other Kray.
I’m still trying to come to terms with an all day breakfast washed down with a couple of pints of Stella, but with all food safely disposed of, including the surplus bowl of chips, they started to play fight, this included the slapping of faces, grabbing at shoulders and naturally, passing wind. They should have been stockbrokers, emigrated to Surbiton and travelled to foreign countries, but, they remained skinheads, in Brighton, suspended in time.
There was a time when I religiously went for a swim most lunch times, then again I was healthier then, less blubber around the midriff. There was the occasional thrill of catching a glimpse of someone under 30 and remotely attractive, someone perfecting the breaststroke, a metre ahead of me. Instead, I had to be content with a herd of seventy year olds furiously working towards extending their shelf life and putting me to shame. In time I began to recognise the faces, there was an occasional nod of acknowledgement, responding sometimes to banal chat like ‘oh, the water’s really cold today, you don’t know what’s gonna freeze off next’, I would always respond with ‘yep’, weary about getting into anything more complicated though would hold back from quipping ‘well its cold every fucking day’.
Sadly I would recognise them by their boils, their burns and their moles and other degenerative growths. I’d recognise others by their scar tissue and others just from their repulsive body odour. Life really was that grim, sharing chlorine-tainted water with incontinent 70 year olds, fuck knows what I may have swallowed in that time when I was competing with senility in the pool.
I must also explain that my swimming technique was then quite hopeless as it is now. I push off spectacularly underwater and then launch into a breathtaking breaststroke that generates enough energy to power under soil heating for Wembley Stadium but still it takes me almost a minute to complete a 25 metre journey. By the time I’ve completed a length my then geriatric competitors would be on their next length and I would be playing catch up, and catch up would involve chasing unsightly cellulite and pubic hair that was last trimmed in 1962, still I would persevere.
