What are tenterhooks? Are they the hooks you use to hook your tent onto the pegs? Next time some boring bastard is boring me by talking about cars or snowboarding or local issues, I’m going to interject with “please, don’t go on - I’m off tenterhooks here.”
SO I’m in the Spar, and I’ve got the soda and the chocolate and the chips, and all that’s left on my list is the cottage cheese. So I’m looking in the fridge section - yoghurt, sour cream, milk - but I can’t see any cottage cheese. So I go up to the bloke at the counter and ask him if he’s got any cottage cheese. So he sort of looks at me funny, sort of crumpling his brow, and he says “what?” So I say “Cottage cheese, you know, a sort of a soft gungy cheese, comes in tubs. Have you got any?” So he looks at me all moonstruck and just shrugs uncomprehendingly. So now I’m getting irate; I grab the bloke by the lapels and get up-close and yell “cottage cheese, motherfucker! Do you have it?” and then without waiting for an answer I put ten bucks down on the counter for the soda, chocolate and chips and walk out onto the street and kick the lamp-post, hard. So I try the other place across the road.
“Mouton Cadet” I said, looking at the wine bottle. “What does it mean, anyway? Sheep something. ‘Mouton’ is ’sheep’, right?”
She was silent for a moment, distracted by a passing blimp. Then she said “What? Okay. Yes, it means ‘Sheep Cadet’. You’ve seen them standing outside the liquor store, collecting. ‘Baa. Sheep Cadets. Baaa’. I think for every bottle sold a dollar goes to the Sheep Cadets”.
“Of course” I said. “The Sheep Cadets”.
“Baaa”.
Homeopathy. Five syllables to make any reasonable person snort with derision, and then weep tears of penicillin at the absurdity of the whole idea.
But this morning I thought I’d give it a go with the baby’s breakfast. I diluted the minced broccoli 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times with oatmeal, so that the oatmeal retained only a scientifically-undetectable ‘memory’ of broccoli, and do you know what, she ate the sodding lot. Will this mend her (perfectly reasonable in my opinion) aversion to minced broccoli, or will it simply cure her of broccoli, which after all sounds more like a disease than a foodstuff? Not being a homopath, I don’t know.
Perhaps I should send that recipe to Heston Blumenthal so that he can flog it in his world-famous eatery ‘The Fat Fuck’.
My favourite bit of breakfast time is the stillness before the storm. Baby E is strapped in her chair, glancing feverishly from side to side, when her eye alights on the nosh and there is a tensile second of crackling anticipation before she lunges towards it, mouth gaping, like a crazed alcoholic in the vicinity of a 2l bottle of White Lightning.
Like everyone else, I like haiku but I have a couple of problems with them:
1. They don’t tell a proper story. You read a haiku and you sort of have an idea about what it’s trying to say but actually getting the story straight, well it’s almost impossible. Mainly this is due to haiku-writers thinking they’re actually poets and therefore not saying what they mean but instead saying something a bit like what they mean, or even worse, the exact oposite of what they mean, you know what I mean.
2. They’re way too long. By the time you get to the third line you’ve forgotten how they started. You keep having to go back and re-read bits to try and piece all the words and clauses together. And of course you keep having to count the syllables to make sure it’s a real haiku.
Now I’m not saying let’s get rid of all the haiku on the internet, there are far too many for that. But in the future instead of going to all the trouble of writing a haiku, I think it would make more sense to do three word stories instead. The three word story, invented by me, is a story of at most three words. You can use two words or one word but no more than three words. And all the words have to be on the same line. And they have to tell a story, they can’t just say ‘the trees are flappy and brown’ or ‘the apparition of those faces in the crowd / petals on a wet, black bough’ or any of that.
Here’s an example:
Petronella went skiing.
Please leave examples in the comments below. Thank you.
So she says to me, ‘would you like a clementine’, and I’m thinking ‘do I look like I’d like a flaming clementine, do I look like a fruity cunt to you do I’, I say to her ‘no thanks I’m fine’ and ‘go on’ she says, ‘it’s not going to kill you’, and I’m thinking ‘that’s hardly the point though is it, lots of things won’t kill you, raw cabbages won’t kill you and nor will fish eyes but that doesn’t mean I go around stuffing my stupid face with these things, just because I’ll live through it, does it, is it’ but not wanting an argument I take the clementine anyway, which is surprisingly small and bright and juicy and when she’s not looking I eat a bit of it and before I know it I’m cramming it into my gob, pith and all, juice all over my chin, up my nose, the luminous flesh of the thing bursting open in between my teeth, bits of clementine getting in my brain, zest oozing from my eyeballs, my hair all waving like a flaming orange anemone, and then suddenly everything seems hung in hyaline, and the room glows softly like a red and orange lantern in a storm.
My heart skipped a beat today when I saw the news that Ram Bomjan, the 10-yr old Nepalese buddha boy, had reappeared. For those still ignorant of the buddha boy’s story, here’s a synopsis: buddha boy sits under tree for 10 months not eating or drinking, not even gnats’ nuts or vegan water; people come and pay good rupees to look at buddha boy, buy buddha boy t-shirt, throw pebbles at buddha boy to try and make him move, etc.; buddha boy disappears into forest causing t-shirt sales to double. Today’s news is that the buddha boy has reappeared briefly after two weeks in the woods, telling his followers he’ll be gone for six years and they’d better still be praying for him when he gets back.
Leaving aside the obvious, that Ram ‘buddha boy’ Bomjan is highly unlikely to ever emerge from the forest because he’s almost certainly been eaten by a yeti or blown to buggery-bollocks by Maoist rebels, if indeed he was ever more than a shoddily-assembled mannequin like you see outside every British 7-11, minded by a brace of wretched urchins, on any given night in November, leaving all that aside, I cannot be alone in thinking that Nepalese budda boy Ram Bomjan (left) bears a striking, not to mention uncanny, resemblance to one-time Jesus and Mary Chain ‘drummer’ and Primal Screamer Bobby Gillespie (right).
KE: Would you like an orange?
menace: No thanks.
KE: Go on. Why not?
menace: Because I don’t want one. Besides, oranges are not the only fruit.
KE: What?
menace: You know that book by the lesbian. What it means is, say you’re a woman, you don’t have to have sex with men, if you want you can just eat an orange.
KE: I’ll remember that.
Since time began St Patrick’s day has been a big pain in the bollocks because of all the imbeciles getting rotten drunk all day and cavorting in the gutter while normal people like myself try to do whatever it is that we do. I don’t care if you actually are Irish, you must be able to think up a better excuse for creosoting the common byways with the contents of your filthy bellies than the birthday or whatever it is of some bald old monk from thousands of years ago who for all we know was nothing but a big bastard, and probably didn’t exist anyway.
But nowadays we have an additional annoyance to put up with on this miserable day of feckerphilia, and that is boring cunts who go on and on about how much they hate St Patrick’s day because they can’t have a quiet drink in their local. Would it kill you to stay at home and sip your Indian Pale Ale for one day in the year if it’s zen you’re after you horrible tedious cunts? These are the same rotters who bore you to hell about what a shame it is that no-one celebrates St George’s day. Except they celebrate St George’s day 364 days of the fucking year, by sitting in pubs saying fuck all to each other, looking morose and picking at the Racing Post with the stub of a pencil, gumming on a two-thirds full pint glass of flat brown bitter, or for the younger ones, by drinking disgusting gassy lager and alcopops and impregnating each other in public, the scum.
A terrible day, I really can’t be fucked with it at all.
This afternoon, like all afternoons, I’ve accomplished all sorts of things. Some were objectives of mine and some were objectives of other people, but often it’s the accomplishments which aren’t objectives at all that satisfy me most. The one of which I’m most proud, today, is drinking a full 1.5l bottle of Nestlé water, even though it tasted fucking nothing like coffee. I had wondered why it was only a buck fifty.
I’ve given up drinking the filtered water from the cooler. The contaminant-removal process just seemed a bit too brutal.
Is it possible to get vegan water? Our local ‘Capers’ supermarket is a mecca for gimpy health food types and on one wall they have a noticeboard where you can write out little notes to the store management, asking why they don’t stock tofu-flavoured yoghurt or macrobiotic monkey-spunk and what percentage of their packaging is recycled into fart-powered wigwams. Maybe I’ll post my question there.