the new adventures of juliette

Geek Of The Week

2010-12-21T13:56:00.002Z

Christ alive.

Come back, Roissy. All is forgiven.

My favourite quote of the article?

'It is hypocritical to build consensus around an ideal of positive masculinity without seeking to challenge those aspects of masculinity which remain deeply and negatively entrenched.'

Well, fuckin’ A, Josh Hadley.

And I bet you make a mean organic lentil and tofu bake, and all.

You know I said a while back that I exclusively seemed to go for politically incorrect right-wing types? Well, this article single-handedly contains the reason why.

Gotta love that F Word site...

J x

No Material Girl

2010-12-14T09:31:00.002Z

I am suffering from a serious lack of material. It’s not that nothing’s happening this end. Quite the opposite. There’s plenty happening. Just nothing I can write about.

Wary as I am about damaging that infinitely fragile fourth wall, I’m loath to give you e.g. a travel report on where I’ve been lately, or where I might be off to in the not-so-distant future. And travel isn’t like cars or London neighbourhoods or restaurants, where Notting Hill can easily become Fulham with no visible ill-effects on the flow of my story. If you change e.g. Dubai to e.g. Milan, none of your comments about it will make any sense whatsoever.

The only alternative is to write about the real thing. However, this clearly pinpoints specific details of where I’ve been and who I’ve been with, and therefore any acquaintance of mine reading it will immediately know who I am in real life.

It’s a fucker, I tell thee.

Anyway, even if I could write all about my recent exploits without fear of revealing identifying details, I’d just end up with something that reads like a not very bright but immensely spoilt ten year old’s What I Did In My Holidays essay. I’ve tried. I’ve re-read. I’ve immediately dispatched the works to data heaven in an attempt at quality control. I know.

So we’re back to the time-honoured ‘hostage letter’ style. I am well and happy. Do not fear for me. Please leave the ten thousand pounds in the agreed place next Tuesday or the man with the moustache will cut my ear off and send it to you via Parcelforce.

Inspired stuff, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

It takes something really fucking special, like my last post, to inspire me right now.

So if I’m off the radar for a bit this Christmas, you know why.

Incidentally, for those readers who think my last post was an outpouring of peculiarly female incoherent hysteria,* and who think the sentiments expressed therein are purely a sad laughable girly thing.

Well, there’s a guy called Eamon who’d beg to differ.

And he’s got a couple of platinum discs to back him up.

Five quid to anyone who can spot any fundamental difference between the sentiments expressed in his immortal chart-topper Fuck It (I don’t Want You Back) and those expressed in my own recent Catharsis Corner.

I think that strongly objecting to an ex-lover who treated you like shit crawling back with a lame apology is pretty damned unisex.

As, indeed, is the basic human urge to reply with the words ‘go fuck yourself.’

And a merry Christmas, one and all…

J x

*And if that’s their definition of incoherent hysteria, I’d really like to see their definition of ‘laser-focused ice cold fury.’ On second thoughts, maybe I wouldn’t. That shit sounds scary.

Catharsis Corner

2010-12-10T14:07:00.006Z

What a lovely surprise to see your name appearing in my inbox yesterday.

The ex-boyfriend who I'd thought was different from all the others and genuinely cared about me. The ex-boyfriend who made me change my long-held belief that all men were selfish bastards with no concerns in life beyond their egos and their cocks. The ex-boyfriend I was honestly beginning to think I might end up marrying.

The ex-boyfriend who dumped me out of the blue, and for the pettiest reasons imaginable, the day before my birthday.

The ex-boyfriend who met a women who found it very hard to trust, and changed her into a woman who finds it flat-out impossible.

You'd thought long and hard about sending this email. You deeply regretted treating me so badly. I hadn't deserved it and you were ashamed. You wouldn't blame me if I immediately deleted your email and ignored it.

Well, you pre-empted me there, my love.

As that's exactly what I did.

Because when someone hurts me that badly once, there's no fucking way I'm getting in a situation where they could hurt me that badly again. I wouldn't engage in any form of dialogue with you if I was on fire and you were walking along the street carrying a bucket of water.

Yet I was overcome with frustration as I deleted your words. Because there was so very much I wanted to say. So many feelings that seeing your name again had stirred up inside me.

So I'm saying it on here. Where, according to you, you'll never read it.

For a start, I can't help but wonder why your sudden crisis of conscience chooses to attack you after all these months have passed. A cynic may be inclined to say, because it's now beginning to sink in to even your breathtaking arrogance that it's not quite as easy to upgrade from me as you so complacently imagined. And after several dozen humiliatingly failed first dates with women a little shallower, more critical, more demanding and more physically-preoccupied than yours truly, you've started to wonder whether binning me might have been a little bit hasty.

A cynic may also be inclined to say that - if you were fucking a woman hotter than me, or had any possibility of doing so in the near future - you wouldn't give a tin shit how badly you'd treated me even if I'd walked away after you'd dumped me and slashed my wrists.

A cynic may, indeed, be inclined to think your crisis of conscience is nothing more or less than a lame attempt to crawl back for a second helping, fill up your dating stop-gap and sexual dry spell, and use me a bit longer while continuing your search for Little Miss Right behind my back.

But for the sake of argument, let's just assume that there were no ulterior motives behind your email.

That you'd simply like to open an emotionally-healing dialogue in which I tell you you're forgiven, for reasons of karma a la My Name Is Earl. In an entirely platonic, philanthropic and non-self-interested attempt to make up for the harm you've caused to others.

That you're purely and exclusively seeking closure and forgiveness.

Well, bad news.

You're not getting it from me.

For as long as I live, I will never forget the betrayal, pain and bewilderment I felt waking up that Sunday morning, where you'd left me on the downstairs sofa. And realising it hadn't been a dream at all. After all your promises, and all your 'you're awesomes', you'd dumped me like a sack of shit over a petty drunken row about fuck all. (And this is the same man who stayed with an ex-girlfriend who sent psychotic hate mail to his female friends and tried to push him out of a moving car. Nice to see you have your priorities in order.)

I will never forget creeping upstairs to get my stuff from the bathroom and trying not to wake you. Then creeping out of your house like a thief in the night, and trying to understand why you'd behaved with such savagely cruel finality towards a woman who'd never shown you anything but loyalty, kindness and uncritical affection.

It was by far the worst betrayal I have ever experienced, in a long lifetime of betrayals, simply because I thought you were different - and because I believed all the crap I wrote in this stupid post here. I didn't expect any better from the likes of Sunil. I knew he was a shallow liar only interested in one thing. I thought you weren't.

And I made it extraordinarily easy for you, via my own swift, silent, uncomplaining departure. Most of the women I know, treated so unforgivably by a man who'd claimed to love them, would have left a little goodbye present in the form of a couple of slashed tyres or the word CUNT carved into your car's bodywork in foot tall letters.

But I just walked away. Down your road. To the railway station. To London. To my flat. And when the door was locked behind me, I threw myself down on the bed and I cried like I've never cried before in my life.

And after months of hell, I began to heal.

And I began to wonder what in God's name I ever saw in a short, ugly, drug-addicted borderline alcoholic with mental health issues and the worst teeth I've ever seen in my life, whose idea of a glitzy Saturday night is eating a Domino's pizza in front of a DVD.

Oddly, I was asked pretty much this exact same question by two seperate acquaintances of yours at that Christmas party last year, when you weren't around. Both of whom asked me if I'd like to go out with them for dinner some time instead.

If memory serves, one of them used the phrase 'like upgrading your Lada to a Lamborghini.'

But despite their more obvious glamour, I was no more than polite to them and didn't so much as flirt back. Because I thought you were better than them and I thought you were special and I thouht you genuinely cared about me. And I never breathed a word of what they'd said to me that night or ever afterwards, because I didn't want to upset you or make you feel insecure.

What a fucking stupid bitch.

At the risk of venturing into the realms of petty malice (and my God, you've richly earned more petty malice than an entire Red Army of Katie Prices could muster up between them):

As youreminded me occasionally during our relationship (if you cross out the word 'occasionally' in that sentence, and replace it with the words 'every three minutes') you earned not inconsiderably more than me. There wasn't a single conversational topic on earth, from politics to dieting, that you couldn't turn towards highlighting this fascinating phenemonon.

This being the case, I would advise you to spend some of your glittering wealth on some halfway decent clothes and some urgently-needed dental treatment.

Because you look like a fucking pikey.

And when I said that, while you were laughed at for having a massive nose as a kid, the rest of your face had grown around it so it just looked normal-sized now?

Well, to be fair, you said you loved me and I was The One.

So I guess we're both a pair of lying bastards.

I never want to see you, speak to you, or have any form of contact with you again for the rest of my life. You're a shit, your apology is not accepted, and I wish you nothing but the very, very worst for the future.

More than anything, I hope that one day, you'll meet a woman who you trust and believe in as implicitly as I trusted and believed in you.

And that she then proceeds to treat you exactly the same way you treated me.

Then, and only then, will you be able to understand how truly unforgivable what you did to me really was.

So why don't you cry me a river.

Cry me a river.

I've cried a river over you.

J

Mock The Leak

2010-12-08T13:31:00.002Z

Jesus, Wikileaks. Steady on here.

I’m just getting over your awe-inspiring revelations that have already come out.

That Prince Andrew’s a spoilt thick cock.

And Nicolas Sarkozy’s a short authoritarian tosser.

And David Cameron’s a featherweight fuckwit.

And George Osborne’s an unreal dick (although to be fair, I beat Wikileaks to this one. A quick glance through my archives will show you that I personally and single-handedly broke this earth-shattering story bloody months ago. And nobody believed me, and just accused me of having a repressed sexual crush on him. The fools.)

And that Russia’s a bit on the corrupt side.

And now you seriously expect me to believe that Saudi princes shag hookers and disobey Islamic law by drinking lots of expensive booze?

Sorry, Wikileaks. Not buying it for a second.

And you can stick all that ‘Catholic Pope’ rubbish up your arse and all.

J x

PS - I’ve met someone lovely. This is a bit like Spinal Tap getting a new drummer. Never ends well.

If I was fifteen, I’d draw Tipp-ex hearts with his initials and mine all over my books and folders.

And that Katie Melua song The Closest Thing To Crazy sounds like it’s actually insightful and moving, rather than pass-the-sick-bucket nauseating.

But there’s a saying that’s aimed towards writers of fiction ‘if your characters are having a good time, your readers aren’t’- and this would seem to be equally true of factual writing such as my own. Ironically, it’s much much much much much much easier writing a funny, engaging post about my love life when everything’s shit.

So wait a few weeks, or possibly days, and I’ll almost certainly be back on form again.

Optimism 3, Experience 0.

Unfunny Girls

2010-12-02T12:15:00.002Z

I really, truly hate misogyny. Especially when it’s peddled by women. Which sadly, it all too often is.

Nothing pisses me off more than a fellow woman - who really ought to know an awful lot better – sucking up to men by simperingly agreeing that women are vicious/boring/manipulative/thick/ spiteful etc etc etc.

(And if you ever hear any woman saying airily ‘women are jealous of me, and I only have male friends’ - you can immediately, and without a momentary flicker of hesitation, file her under H for Hateful Conceited Attention Whoring Skank.

Whose odd affinity with the masculine mind, and alienation from the female race, has something to do with the fact that most men’s hateful-conceited-attention-whoring-skankdar is sadly deficient - while most women can spot a complete and total bitch from fifty-nine paces.)

Female misogyny is an insidious form of Uncle Tom-ism that’s as doomed as such things always are. As tiresomely bash-your-head-on-the-wall irritating and deeply pathetic as poverty-line Americans voting against state healthcare and in favour of tax breaks for billionaires.

Hey, Newsflash. Just because you want to see yourself as one of the ruling elite, it doesn’t mean they’re going to let you in.

Your relentless self-abasement and abject willingness to stab your own kind in the back may earn you a fleeting pat on the head from the powers that be.

But - and make no mistake - you’re not sitting at their table, and don’t think you ever are.

The men who’ll smile approvingly and consider you one of the good girls for parroting their misogynistic bullshit are the exact same men who’ll shove you aside without a second thought to get a better look at the nineteen year old blonde standing behind you.

At which point, it won’t matter a rat’s left tit whether you’ve claimed to support patriarchy, matriarchy or a secret world order run by giant Jewish lizards.

So I both hate and pity women who crawl up men’s arses* by dissing their own sex.

I really hate to use the word ‘sisterhood’(not least because it makes me sound like a sad hairy old dyke), but I definitely have a deep-rooted sense of something like it running through the very fabric of my soul. And female misogyny offends it in a big way.

Which is why it pains me deeply to say I’ve come to a troubling conclusion.

Most female comedians are really, really fucking unfunny.

While I’ve had thoughts on these lines for some time – and have vaguely mentioned them before – I came to this definitive conclusion following The Morgana Show on Channel Four. Which was about half as funny as finding a close relative hanging from a beam in your sitting room.

On Christmas Eve.

Not that there aren’t plenty of crap male comics. Horne and Corden. Morecambe and Wise(controversial I know, but I personally laughed more at The Passion of the Christ). Little Britain, consisting of the two most overrated human beings since Joseph Fritzl walked away with the European Dad Of The Year title in 2009.

But these crap male comics are in a minority. Massively outweighed by the Bill Baileys and the Jimmy Carrs and the Steve Coogans and the Tim Minchins and the Chris Rocks and the Bill Hickses and the Doug Stanhopes and the Ricky Gervaises and the Peter Kays and the Leagues of Gentlemen, in a way that the Morganas of this world just aren’t.

And crap male comics tend to suck in any number of different ways. Whereas the vast majority of crap women comics - and that could be shortened by just saying ‘the vast majority of women comics’ – tend to suck in exactly the same ways. Specifically, the same two ways.

They’re either cosy-unfunny or wacky-unfunny.

And I hate them both equally.

Under cosy-unfunny, I’d put French and Saunders, The Vicar of Dibley, Victoria Wood and dinnerladies.

Under wacky-unfunny, I’d put Smack the Pony, Morgana, Absolutely Fabulous and Sarah Silverman.

And if you draw a circle representing cosy-unfunny and another circle representing wacky-unfunny, you’ll see that the point where these two circles overlap has a single word written inside it, and that word is MIRANDA. Credit where it’s due, I know a lot of people actually like Miranda. I just don’t get it. For me, Miranda represents the seventh circle of comedy hell. I really and truly can’t think of anyone on the face of this earth I find more annoying, less likeable or less funny than Miranda Hart. I’d sooner watch a double act with Kim Jong-Il and Piers Morgan**.

The Catherine Tate Show had its moments, and the first series of Jill Davis’ Nighty Night was funny, and Caroline Aherne is brilliant – Mrs Merton was inspired, and The Royle Family’s one of my favourite sitcoms of all time. But to say these genuinely funny women are a bit thin on the ground is putting it mildly.

Even Jo Brand’s sitcom Getting On, while grimly watchable - if only because it makes you realize how blessed one’s own professional life is by comparison – it can’t hold a proverbial candle to the testosterone-soaked genius of The Thick Of It (its foul-mouthed, unstable and infinitely wittier elder brother.)

So why – when plenty of the women I know are hilarious in private – are men en masse so much funnier in public? I find myself tracing this phenomenon back to a single factor, which is quite simply this – incentivize any behavior and you’ll get a hell of a lot more of it.

Especially when you incentivize it in those all-important formative years, when boys and girls don’t yet know what they’re good or bad at – and are open-minded enough to develop in pretty much any direction at all, given the right encouragement and natural aptitudes.

For example, if you could wave a magic wand and change modern primary schools so all the popular boys were great at ballet and all the popular girls were hardcore weight-lifting champions – I guarantee you’d see far, far more graceful boys and far, far stronger girls within the space of a generation.

And you could be sure that they’d carry these skills into later post-school life, where they’d be likely to develop them further – because it would be in their best social interests to do so. Because what’s cool in the playground is also per se cool (admittedly in a more diluted and civilized form) everywhere else.

And as it is, sadly, only one sex grows up knowing they can become far more popular and far higher up on the status ladder if they can be funny in front of a big watching crowd. And it sure ain’t the girls.

Wit is to little girls as good looks are to little boys. Which is to say that it doesn’t hurt, exactly - but it’s certainly not going to get you anywhere on its own.

Well, that’s my theory anyway – I trace it back to the playground.

What do you think?

J x

*A charming image, as I’m sure you’ll all agree.

** In case I haven’t quite managed to get my point across here, I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HATE MIRANDA HART. Not her personally, obviously, as I don’t know her from Adam. But I hate her on-screen persona and her Godawful sitcom with a depth and an intensity that genuinely disturbs me. She is my female version of Gideon Osborne. And if you think I secretly fancy her and all, you can wind your neck in.

Fight Or Flight

2010-11-29T12:27:00.002Z

Now, it pains me to sympathise with Howard Flight.

The fact he’s one of Cameron’s Tories implies that he’s almost certainly a silver-spoon-up-the-arse braying muppet who makes Lord Snooty look like a character from the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

(Maybe, in real life, he’s almost as obnoxious as George Osborne, who I still hate more than anyone else in the world. It’s just something about his face. And his expression. George Osborne is living, breathing, vacantly smirking proof that social status, palpable arrogance, and above average height do not (whatever the PUAosphere may have to say on the matter) automatically equal male sex appeal. Fuck, I’d rather have a night of passion with Dobby the house elf.)

Anyway, when this Howard Flight fellow starts using words like ‘breeding’ about the lower orders (i.e. anyone who allegedly had a grandparent in trade or had to buy his own castle) you’ll automatically file him under T for Tosser.

So it really pains me to say that I feel for the poor old fucker.

Who’s been forced into a humiliating please-don’t-sack-me public apology for stating (albeit ham-fistedly) something that’s so fucking obvious that I defy a five year old retard to question its self-evident truth.

People on long-term benefits have a major financial incentive to have as many kids as early as possible.

And people who are working hard have a major financial incentive to have as few kids as late as possible.

And this is very obviously Not A Good Thing,

As – while what I’m about to say is very obviously not set in stone, and there are many exceptions who’ve simply fallen on hard times through no fault of their own – the former group contains significantly more thick dodgy people who have about as much to offer society as an infestation of plague-bearing rats.

And when you incentivise people like this hideous little rodent-faced mong to reproduce their genes at every available opportunity from the age of twelve and a half - while making the law abiding hard workers too scared to even think about spawning their first Mini-Me till they’re a few short years away from the menopause - you don’t need a degree from the Joseph Mengele School Of Politically Incorrect Eugenics to see what’s likely to happen next.

Call me Mystic Meg, but I foresee significantly more viewers for Jeremy Kyle, significantly less viewers for Jeremy Paxman.

So poor old Howard Flight was absolutely spot on.

But voicing uncomfortable truths or drawing attention to the ten-ton pachyderm crapping on the coffee table is the political equivalent of jumping off Beachy Head (see also Powell, Enoch).

And talking a load of wishy-washy meaningless bollocks is a whole lot safer.

Hence the dizzying amount of non-arguments, non-statements, non-opinions and non-visions floating around in modern politics and lamely pretending to be the real thing.

I’ve come to believe that a political opinion is only a real opinion if a sane, intelligent rival candidate could plausibly argue the opposite in a genuine attempt to win votes. This is how you can tell real opinions from cynical vote-winning crowd-pleasing public-patronising meaningless PR-obsessed bullshit.

For example, take Maggie. And the definitive quote of Thatcherism: ‘there is no such thing as society.’

Many people can and do argue the exact opposite – and are outraged by the very idea. Insisting that yes, there is such a thing as society, and it’s vitally important to a healthy country.

But say what you like about Maggie, she had a true personal vision and she believed in it one hundred per cent. Admittedly the same could be said of Sauron, Lord Voldemort and Adolf Hitler - but credit where it’s due, you can’t fault her on sincerity.

Now, I challenge you to find a similar arguable, controversial quote to define Blairism or Cameronism.

‘Education, education, education’?

Well, I suppose the rival candidate could be standing on the ‘keep ‘em thick, that’s what we say’ ticket. But it’s a bit of a stretch.

‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’?

While the other side says ‘well, this is self-evidently dangerous nonsense. Our party believes in letting dangerous criminals run about murdering grannies in their beds, while doing absolutely nothing whatsoever to prevent the underlying social causes. The more criminals the better, we say. Crime’s great. Vote for us.’

But sadly, there’s a damn good reason why politicians talk such meaningless shite.

Because in this day and age, saying anything that’s sharp, visionary or controversial in any way, shape or form leads to the sort of aggro that Howard Flight’s up to his neck in. And violates the first and only modern political commandment - ‘thou shalt not veer off message, or thine ass is toast.’

Which is why, ninety nine per cent of the time, they’re all so relentlessly on-message it makes your teeth ache.

Assuming that all voters are touchier than a skinned rabbit, catastrophically gullible and have an average IQ of about six.

And generally acting like a nervous try-hard new classroom assistant supervising a class of special needs toddlers, and anxiously pretending to share their love for Iggle Piggle and Barney the Dinosaur.

Take David Cameron in the Sunday papers saying that his whole family loved the X Factor. But it was a bit controversial - he was supporting One Direction, but his daughter Nancy preferred Cher Lloyd.

And I can’t decide whether this would be more unutterably pathetic if it was true or if it was bullshit.

I mean, the thought of a world leader genuinely liking the music of One Direction is pitiful enough.

But the thought of a world leader desperately pretending to admire a talentless fly-by-night teeny-bopper band he secretly despises, like an insecure eleven year old loser trying to ingratiate himself with the cool kids at the back of the bus?

It’s like trying to comprehend the vastness of space, but in terms of infinite lameness.

Again, I feel a wave of nostalgia for good old Mad-Eye Maggie. Admittedly I was quite little in the 80s, but I really can’t imagine her going on the record as saying ‘I absolutely love Debbie Gibson, but Dennis and the kids prefer Bros.’

I feel deeply wistful for a time when politicians were austere elitist grown-ups and happy to be so, and said things they actually believed in. And if some dick in the audience had a problem with that - or thought they weren’t smiley enough, or right-on enough, or down-with-the-kidz enough - that dick in the audience could bite their ass.

Ironically, the one politician who hasn’t succumbed to this horrible try-hard-populist-bullshit-virus – who says what he thinks, wears what he likes, and makes no bones about associating Homer with the Iliad rather than the Simpsons – has far more mass-market popularity than his David Brentishly desperate X-Factor-praising rivals. I refer, of course, to a star so immense that he needs no surname - the one and only Boris.

The electorate might be as dumb as a bunch of little kids in a classroom. But, like a bunch of little kids in a classroom, we can tell when it’s bullshit.

Howard Flight, you have my utmost sympathy.

Good breeding always shows.

J x

Private Pikeys

2010-11-25T13:15:00.002Z

You faaahkin mappets.

Words fail me.

But I really hate repeating myself, and I’ve said all this before.

More than once, in fact.

Bad idea, parents.

Just.

Don’t.

Really.

J x

Short Shrift

2010-11-24T17:14:00.001Z

I loved this article. Especially the comments section. And it got me thinking on the subject of short-versus-long-hair for women.

I’ll leave out my thoughts on Emma Watson, because they’re irrelevant (although, for the record and as a devoted Harry Potter fan, I think she’s both much, much prettier than I ever imagined Hermione being, and distinctly less pretty than she’s widely given credit for. To use the tiresome language of the manosphere, I imagined Hermione as a 5, Emma’s an 8, and she gets written about like she’s a 10.)

From the ultra-predictable female comments, long hair is a form of female oppression to rival foot-binding, while short hair is a gesture of liberation and sexual equality.

Freeing you from the vicious dictatorship of conventional femininity, and giving you the time to invent that cure for cancer or become Foreign Secretary.

Although, judging from a fair few short-haired women I know - who have notably yet to invent a cure for cancer or become Foreign Secretary – it’s actually just freed them up to spend more time watching crap telly and down the pub.

Which, don’t get me wrong, isn’t such a bad thing at all.

But as to whether it’s morally or intellectually superior to spending the extra hour with a hairdryer, some Philip Kingsley spray and the trusty old GHDs… the jury’s out.

Furthermore, I’ve never met a normal man who doesn’t prefer long hair on a woman.

And I’ve certainly never been out with a man who wouldn’t react to his other half coming home with an unexpected Eton crop much as his other half would react to him coming home saying he’d just spent his entire Christmas bonus in Spearmint Rhino.

As with so many things, the short-hair-loving men appear to exist solely in a magical parallel universe I’ve never been to.

Where I like to think they can live in happy harmony with the men who honestly don’t notice cellulite and the men who actually prefer a woman to have a bit of meat on her and the magic dancing unicorns with pixies riding on their backs.

But for once, I’m actually quite pleased I don’t meet men like this.

Show me a man who genuinely prefers the pixie crop to the glossy high-volume supermodelly mega-mane in real life.

Who finds the post-haircut Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby more sexually desirable than Raquel Welch in 10,000 BC.

Who finds Carey Mulligan more sexually desirable than Megan Fox.

And I’ll show you a man who’s one traumatic event and two bottles of wine away from trying to suck his best friend’s cock.

A man who’s so far in that closet he’s off for tea and Turkish delight with Jadis, Queen of Narnia.

Closet cases aside, it looks like some of the male long-hair-haters are the same kind of freaks who hate women wearing make-up – and are motivated by a deep-rooted misogyny that’s much, much scarier, sicker, angrier, darker and more virulent than your basic Nuts-mag sexism.

(There’s too much to say on this subject to touch on briefly, and it probably deserves a post in its own right. But I firmly believe that sexists and misogynists are two very different creatures - who may look a bit alike on the surface, but don’t be fooled. Sexists love brightly coloured lipstick, acrylic nails, ladette culture, casual sex and girls snogging girls in nightclubs. Misogynists hate, fear, obsess over and revile all of the above. Sexists secretly dream of a world where all women have to wear a miniskirt. Misogynists secretly dream of a world where all women have to wear a burka.)

Sexists inevitably and generically hate short hair on a woman. When it comes to misogynists, however, the jury’s out, and some of them actually prefer it.

Quite apart from these few warped and eerie specimens, the other men on the pro-short-hair side of the debate are mostly the dim-as-a-forty-watt-bulb numpties who say blithely ‘if a woman’s got a pretty enough face, she’ll look fantastic with short hair.’

Without ever realizing they might just as well be saying ‘If a woman’s got a pretty enough face, she’ll look fantastic with a large spot on her chin.’

I mean, it’s true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t mean that cultivating large spots on one’s chin is, in any way, shape or form, a good look.

Helen of Troy may have looked extraordinarily beautiful with an urchin-style crop.

But I guarantee you she would have looked a whole lot more extraordinarily beautiful with a great big fuck-off glossy Cindy-Crawford-style blow dry.

This, off the record, is my personal definition of a crap trend that anyone with half a brain should avoid like the bloody plague; ‘anyone who looks good in it will look much, much better in practically anything else you can possibly imagine.’

(See also: kitten heels, harem pants, novelty false eyelashes, yeti boots and black lipstick.)

There’s a good reason why Miss World contestants don’t have their hair cut very short.

And why female Nazi collaborators in newly-liberated France did.

In terms of female attractiveness, very short hair is definitively and emphatically Not A Good Thing.

Reminiscent of mental patients and lipstick-less lesbians and Jodie Foster in The Accused.

And concentration camps.

And cancer.

If these associations turn you on - tell your psychiatrist, but don’t tell me.

The only woman I’ve ever seen who looked really, genuinely super-hot with very short hair
was Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta - when she’s supposed to be in prison, but she isn’t really, and it’s V doing it all along. (And the diary she finds behind that stone in her cell is a fake, which is bloody ridiculous when you think of it, as there’s no way V could have possibly known for sure she was going to find it – and if she hadn’t found it, that would have been two or three weeks’ worth of writing straight down the bog.

(But then again, what can you expect from a film so fucking stupid that its secret mad-lone-rebel’s hideaway resembles a cross between Roman Abramovitch’s London pad and the Library Bar in the Lanesborough. Because of course, when our lone masked hero was single-handedly stealing priceless art treasures from the dark subterranean corners of London and squirreling them away in his makeshift concealed cellar, he was actually aided by a vanful of burly removal men and the entire fucking production team from Changing Rooms.

(But I digress, forgive me. Back to Natalie Portman’s haircut.)

Natalie Portman looked fabulous with an almost-shaved head, but this may have been helped by the following factors. Number one, she’s one of the most stunningly beautiful actresses in Hollywood to start off with. Number two, she was perfectly lit and photographed in a haunting, atmospheric, bleak-yet-deceptively-flattering light.

And number three – if you knew your Nars from your elbow - it was blindingly obvious that her bruised and vulnerable yet haunting make-up-free beauty was the sort of bruised and vulnerable yet haunting make-up-free beauty you can only achieve by spending two and a half hours under the hands and brushes of a highly skilled make-up artist.

And despite all this, she still didn’t look anywhere near as good as she’d looked with long hair in the first place.

The prosecution rests.

I prefer long hair, anyway.

Any thoughts?

J x

Right Royal Whingers

2010-11-22T13:27:00.003Z

Here are my thoughts on the forthcoming royal wedding.

I don’t really give too much of a fuck one way or the other.

There. That’s told you.

On balance however, I’d say I’m broadly in favour of it, and the whingers and naysayers can piss off.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of the royals by any stretch of the imagination. And don’t even get me started on Diana’s death. For me, its aftermath was like some terrifying Twilight Zone episode where you woke up to find everyone you knew had been replaced by a terrifying race of retarded aliens. And they could read your mind if you didn’t look sad enough. And if they found you were thinking less-than-worshipful thoughts about the People’s Princess, they’d zap you dead on the spot.

Your parents. Your friends. The man in the corner shop. Absolutely everyone you knew had had their brains scooped out and replaced by these special needs pod people.

And in desperation, you thought you were going to take the matter to the government.

And then the prime minister came on the news, and you saw he was one of them too.

Brrrr.

But Diana aside, I generally view the royal family in much the same way as I view, say, coffee tables. I’m not going to rave about them, or worship them, or go out of my way for a fleeting glimpse of one. They’re just there.

Yet I’m grudgingly willing to concede that they have a place in a well-ordered universe. And that - through no great gifts of their own - the world would be a slightly worse place without them.

You want President Cameron and First Lady SamCam living in the British White House and flying about in Air Force One?

Really?

From where I stand, the cost of the Royals - and even of the Wills-and-Kate wedding - is ultimately pretty small beans compared to the war in Iraq and bailing out Ireland and buying new nukes from America and God only knows what other shit we have to pay for out of our taxes whether we want it or not.

Now, I haven’t got the exact figures to hand any more than the Guardian-dwelling royal hatas, but – in the spirit of democracy and social equality they purport to so admire – I can only conclude that my unfounded back-of-a-fag-packet bullshit is just as good as theirs.

And I’m just as entitled to make shit up I understand nothing about, with no economic background or training whatsoever.

And so I’ll say with professorial certainty that the substantial investment in the royal wedding will be recouped several times over from tourists.

Because it just will be.

It just will, all right?

So shut up.

Admittedly, I have no earthly way of knowing what the costs and benefits really will be, and how they’ll really tally up on the day. But that’s much like the Zoe Williamses and Polly Toynbees and Tanya Golds of this world, and they don’t let a little thing like overwhelming ignorance stop them from yacking on like they know it all.

(Incidentally, their class-based bitterness and power-to-the-people schtick might be a bit more convincing if it didn’t come from a bunch of spoilt rich twats who walked into their cushy media jobs without breaking a sweat because Daddy went to Ampleforth with the editor.

Day boy, mind you. None of your toffs at the Guardian.*)

But I do know for sure that tourists eat this shit up like ice cream, and they’ll be all over a photogenic royal wedding like a tramp on chips.

Fact is, that’s what tourists like about England, and it’s pretty much all that tourists like about England. Like it or not.

To the watching, hotel-booking, open-topped-bus-tour-taking world, we’re a pretty little anachronistic Lilliput Lane of a country. A land of cream teas and cucumber sandwiches and cricket matches and gentle unworldly middle-aged ladies cycling to church on a Sunday morning. Royalty running through the entire fabric of our society like the words on a stick of Brighton rock.

Oddly, I can’t think of any country, anywhere, whose public image is so wildly out of kilter with its actual reality.

I always feel a bit sorry for poor old Buddy and Mary Sue Plaskett of Nebraska, who’ve spent their life savings on a once-in-a-lifetime European tour,

They’ll go to Paris, home of the elegant rude snooty type, and they’ll almost immediately meet an elegant rude snooty type.

And they’ll go to Italy, home of the oily charmer with the major Madonna/whore complex, and they’ll almost immediately meet an oily charmer with a major Madonna/whore complex.

And they’ll go to Ireland, home of the amiable twinkly-eyed drunk who never shuts up. And they’ll almost immediately meet an amiable twinkly-eyed drunk who never shuts up.

And finally, they’ll come over to good old Blighty. Home of the diffident-yet-charming well-spoken young gentleman with floppy hair, a slight stammer, and a severe yet oddly endearing case of emotional constipation.

And they’ll almost immediately meet a vomiting chav scumbag threatening to glass them in the face for looking at them funny.

Talk about false advertising.

It’s as if our national archetype – a strange, precious and delicate creature ill-adapted to the brutal realities of the modern world – actually keeled over and dropped dead some time in the late 1960s.

But we didn’t dare go public with this news for fear of completely destroying our tourist industry.

So whenever the tourists showed up, we gamely pretended it was still alive like the titular character in Weekend At Bernie’s. Buckingham Palace and all it implies is like the stick propping good old Bernie up - and the cunning little mechanism making his cold dead hand wave at the camera-snapping crowds.

You’d think that sooner or later, someone’s going to notice that the old fellow’s in the advanced stages of decomposition – and that his nose fell off some time in the mid-80s.

But maybe not, because – as any Londoner could tell you - foreign tourists aren’t the brightest little buttons in the box.

Keep him at a safe enough distance from the crowds, and his greenish pallor just looks like a bit of a hangover.

Still, if we’re going to have a royal family - and we’d haemorrhage tourists if we ever chucked ours out – it makes sense to have a proper one. Those foreign royals having professional jobs and riding round on bikes and watching the pennies are just shit. Do it or don’t do it.

Want to know what you call an old-fashioned, extravagant, wasteful monarchy?

A tautology.

But people who hate the royals have gone into serious overdrive on the subject of the royal wedding. Snobbery. Anachronism. Social inequality. Discriminatory class system. Blah blah blah blah blah.

Americans claim this snobbish preoccupation with social class and background is an exclusively English concern, and they don’t have it round their neck of the woods at all.

And credit where it’s due, I dare say they’re right.

This is why it’s such a commonplace event for the Harvard-bound WASPish Boston Brahmins to enter into serious relationships with the manky-toothed single teenage mothers on welfare.

Happens all the time in the classless States.

If I had a penny for every time I’d read about the impending nuptials of, say, Bruce Winthrop III and LaKeeSha Brice, I’d be a rich lady by now.

This classless ethos and effortless social fluidity must also be why 'not-your-typical-horsey-looking-princess-in-everything-but-name-at-all' Chelsea Clinton married a mullet-sporting trailer-dweller called Billy Bob Scratchett. Whose hobbies included demolition derbies, petty crime and working as a dishwasher at the Crab Shack - and who was descended from a penniless family of part-time rabbit thieves.

And why their union was marked by a simple, inexpensive ceremony of democratic modesty and communal inclusiveness. To which all of American’s socially-equal citizens, rich and poor alike, were warmly welcomed with open arms.

*Snork*

Simple fact. Snobbery, class structures and social inequality are in existence absolutely fucking everywhere that sentient beings exist.

This applies whether you’re living in a monarchy, a presidency, a dictatorship, a grimly prophetic communist dystopia or a whimsical distant planet inhabited by talking shoes.

Christ, there are probably chimpanzees sneering at other chimpanzees for eating their bananas funny and living in a crap tree.

I’m filing this inconvenient little fact, along with ‘men like sex more than women’ in the cabinet marked ‘that’s just bloody life. Don’t like it, tough shit.’

So simpering, cloying congratulations to Kate and Wills anyway, may they be very happy in the future and blah blah blah. Although apparently, Prince Harry won’t be going to the wedding.

It’s family only.

J x

* Like Ed Miliband attacking the PM for being upper-class, overprivileged and hopelessly out of touch with society’s dark underbelly. Fuck, yeah. While the young David Cameron was trying on his first top hat for Eton, the Miliband krew were selling crack on the mean streets of Primrose Hill. In the ghetto, it all come down to how you carry it, yo. Shit be real.

Of Love And Other Demons

2010-11-18T13:55:00.001Z

Well, you’ll be pleased to hear I’m breaking it off with the guy – as any relationship that makes you feel this achingly, suicidally ‘meh’ in the first few months is very obviously not going anywhere.

When you find yourself thinking ahead to the prospect of spending another weekend together - with the sort of optimism and anticipation you normally reserve for completing a particularly problematic tax return or clearing out the cat’s litter - you know things aren’t ideal.

Despite the practical and convenience-related benefits of this union, I would far far far far rather be spending the weekend – and, indeed, the rest of my life - on my own.

And if the advocates of ‘settling’ are talking about overcoming reservations as huge and overpowering as these, I can only assume they set a far higher value on Agas, double garages and en suite bathrooms than I do.

I’ve heard that – when faced with a tough decision - a good problem-solving trick is to think about the possible long-term repercussions for a few days as if you’ve already made the decision, and then see how you feel.

So I spent a few days thinking it was this time next year, I’d moved into his house and got engaged to him.

And as this started to feel like reality, for the first time in my life, I began to understand the unfathomable depths of hopeless, futureless clinical depression.

Also for the first time in my life, the Comfort Eating Monster vaulted over the previously impenetrable boundaries of Appesat and went running riot. I couldn’t even summon up the energy to chase after the little bastard and corral it by the fridge.

Assuming this relationship was permanent, we were living together, I had his ring on my finger and I’d decided that was that, there just wasn’t any point in dieting, or exercising - or, for that matter, breathing.

If this is all I have to look forward to in my love life, I really might as well just step off a fucking bridge.

Hence the imminent breakup.

Upon reflection, I think people tend to seriously overestimate what dull security and four-square conventionality means to me – which, in reality, is very very very very little.

I love things like clothes, shoes, handbags, beauty treatments and holidays.

But when it comes to things like sofas, curtains, kitchens, etc, I really couldn’t give a tin shit.

I’ve now met this man’s friends, as well as his grown-up children by his previous marriage. Superficially, this all went perfectly well. But at a deeper level, it was horribly reminiscent of my university experiences.

Every single one of the buggers was Middle England incarnate.

It was genuinely chilling to realize I’m dating someone who could very easily have been one of the Wankfordshire Uni dads.

As blood-curdling moments of revelation go, that one was up there with the hand coming out of the grave at the end of Carrie.

I can never relax with people like that lot. It’s nothing personal - they’re decent enough, and quite harmless. It’s just that I feel intensely uncomfortable with them. We’re not only not on the same wavelength. We’re not even working in the same media.

I just know they wouldn’t have ‘got’ Mulholland Drive.

And they wouldn’t have liked the Gormenghast trilogy.

And they wouldn’t feel tempted to crack open another bottle at 11.45 on a Saturday night.

And they wouldn’t have laughed at the Jimmy Carr line ‘they say there’s safety in numbers. Try telling that to six million Jews.’

And if they ever read this blog, I guarantee you that they wouldn’t laugh once.

In fact, I could give specific details of their ages and what they look like and what they do for a living, and I’d have absolutely nothing to worry about. Because even if they’d stumbled on this page by accident, I know for a fact that I’d have lost them by the second or third line.

We just don’t get each other. And if I’m in any way ‘myself’ with them, I just know I’ll immediately get filed under W for Weirdo. Which isn’t such an insult, as – from their point of view – this is a file that also contains everything I love most in the world. In fact, pretty much everything that isn’t law, accountancy, Michael McIntyre, Waitrose and Jamie fucking Oliver.

In such company, I can feel a stressed-out little censor working flat out in my mind – vetting everything I’m about to say for any material that could potentially cause surprise, comment, controversy or offence.

Which is a bit like trying to edit One Hundred Days Of Sodom for the parish mag.

So I generally just end up sitting there simpering like a muppet, making cups of tea, and consequently appearing to be even more dull and retarded than they are - which is quite a trick.

Anyway, living in a gated community full of people like this would be about as well-suited to yours truly’s likes and dislikes as moving into the Entymology Unit’s spider department in my local zoo.

In the immortal words of Zarathustra, ‘fuck that for a game of conkers.’

So I’m ending this relationship in the very near future.

Perhaps I’ve been spoilt by my last longish (a year or so) relationship. It’s given me the ridiculous and unrealistic belief that, in order to settle down with a man, I should genuinely like him and enjoy spending time with him. Not spending time with him in a posh restaurant, or spending time with him on an exotic beach, or spending time with him in a five-star hotel. Just spending time with him.

What I really want, and my ultimate non-negotiable, is someone I can spend three days on my own with over Christmas - snowed in, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing else to do and the car frozen solid in the driveway. And actually enjoy the experience.

And I did this with my ex last year, so I know it’s possible.

Oh, perhaps I’ve got the old rose-tinted glasses on. Perhaps hindsight is working its usual weird dark magic. Perhaps last Christmas wasn’t really all that and a bag of chips. And perhaps our cosy, idyllic Boxing Day curled up together in front of an open fire was less ‘lost in a private world of silent contentment and unspoken affection’ than ‘extremely hung over and half asleep.’

But you know, it looks lovely in retrospect.

And the idea of such a situation ever arising with my current man is scarier than The Shining.

Quite a lot like The Shining, actually.

If I found myself snowed in and spending three days alone with this new man, there are only so many Mike Leigh-esque conversations about the weather or the dinner I could endure before I snapped and started chasing him upstairs with an axe.

To say I’d rather spend the festive season alone is the understatement of the twenty-first century.

Sadly, everyone who falls into the ‘single and fun’ category and is within my preferred age range - which is 45 plus - has some serious problems. I used to wonder if my ideal man’s age would go up along with mine, or if it would plateau at a steady 40ish - but nope, it’s still going up. If I’m still single when I’m sixty, I’ll be looking for Mr Right in the geriatrics home.

(Off topic, I’m never sure whether to laugh or cry when I read things saying that dating older men is supposed to make your love life easier - because all the attractive single men want much younger women and never look at their own age group for serious relationships.

Starts with B. Rhymes with ‘rollocks’.

Look at the women who only ever consider men of their own age, scornfully reject the pervy fortysomethings, and consider a 3 year age-gap to be a creepy deal-breaker. It’s these chicks who have the charmed love-lives with the gorgeous men who worship the ground they walk on.

Because the ‘men with sexual options always choose much younger women’ thing is one of those things in life that everyone knows, but is actually not true.

From my considerable, nay encyclopedic, experience of being the youngest woman at any given boyfriend’s-work-do function - and one half of the biggest age-gap couple in the room – I can tell you this for a fact.

The most attractive middle-aged men who are successful, decent, likeable and non-creepy tend to exclusively date and marry within 5 years of their own age. Even when they’re tying the knot for the second or third time.

And when it comes to women young enough to be their daughters, such men operate by a strict policy of ‘look but don’t touch’ (with, perhaps, the occasional, ‘look, pay, touch, leave, fuck off back to wife and say you were working late’ exception.)

On the other end of the scale, the middle-aged men who fetishise 20 year age gaps in serious relationships - and would never even consider a life partner who’d been out of nappies when they first got married - are the exact middle-aged men that no woman with half a brain would ever want anything to do with.

Name me an exception, and I guarantee you there is cash involved.

If a man like this hasn’t got the moolah to back it up, he is doomed to a love life like the first ten minutes of Shallow Hal (although at least he’s constantly being told to fuck off by beautiful nineteen year olds, thereby impressing his friends with his super-tight Game and alpha male status. Constantly being told to fuck off by plain middle aged women is just embarrassing.)

From extensive personal observation - men your own age are a far better bet romantically, far more likely to seriously commit to you, and far more likely to treat you well.

it’s just my bloody bad luck that as a general rule, I don’t fancy them.

Absent dad. Single mum.

Be a Freud.

But there’s a long complex post here for another day, so I’ll leave it here.)

Returning to the original point, it’s a sad fact that the fun entertaining single men in this age range are generally flat broke - having spent the preceding forty-something years doing fun things that don’t earn any money, and avoiding the corporate ladder like the proverbial plague. And while, whatever some of my readers think, megabucks is not a priority or even a desire for me, financial stability is. (Financial stability is not the same thing as wealth. I don’t need Bugattis in my life, but I also really, really, really don’t need bailiffs.)

The small minority of fun single ones who have somehow managed to acquire good jobs and avoid vast mountains of debt generally have serious issues (booze, drugs, etc) – which, from experience, I’ve come to regard as an instant deal-breaker.

The tiny, microscopic, invisible-to-the-naked-eye minority of fun single ones with good jobs and no serious deal-breakers such as alcoholism or drug abuse are generally those who’ve never been hitched, never had kids, and have reached their middle forties without an engagement ring in sight.

Who are perfect in every conceivable way. Wonderful company. Funny. Sexy. Glamorous.

All apart from the fact that - if you’ve got half a brain - it’s glaringly obvious that a man like this who’s never settled down before his mid-forties is never going to do so now.

For which I can’t really blame them, and fair play to the blokes. Because in their place, I know I’d feel exactly the same.

I’m stuffed if I can see why a good-looking 45 year old with pots of cash, a glamorous lifestyle and adoring female company whenever he wants it is going to wake up one morning and think, ‘hmm, there’s something missing in my life. What I really need is a screaming baby, an increasingly dull and shapeless wife, and a hugely acrimonious, traumatic and costly divorce eight or nine years down the line. Hey, if I’m really lucky, maybe I can lose the house too.’

Anyway, regarding my love life, the fairytale is over.

I refer of course to the classic Grimm tale of ‘The Increasingly Bitter Single Blogger Girl And the Boring Git.’

The Disney cartoon version’s brilliant. Gotta love Steve Carell’s voice-over work as the Git.

Mad love,

J x

Tales From The Script: Another Year

2010-11-17T13:51:00.003Z

Another Year

By Mike Leigh and Juliette

(INT: a Doctor’s surgery. Imelda Staunton is sitting with a Kindly Female Doctor.)

Imelda Staunton - Hello, I’m Imelda Staunton. You may recognize me from such films as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which wasn’t bad, and Vera Drake, which was absolutely fucking awful. And whose inexplicably superb reviews were only equaled by the infinite bum-numbing relentless suicidal tedium of the film itself.

Kindly Female Doctor - This one has the same director. Mike Leigh. Similar rave reviews, too. Ominous. What are you doing in this thing?

Imelda Staunton - God knows. I’m nothing to do with the story, such as it is, at all. I just get counseled by the heroine for about five minutes in about an hour or so. But I’m depressed and can’t sleep.

Kindly Doctor – Well, sit through the next hour of this turd. It’s separated into quarters marking the passage of the seasons, beginning with ‘Spring’. If you’re not wandering into the land of Nod by the time ‘Autumn’ rolls round, I’ll eat my stethoscope.

(EXT: middle aged woman in rainy allotment)

Geri – (wisely) Hello viewers, I’m Geri. I work with a bunch of depressing old gits in a boring little doctor’s surgery, I live in a bog standard semi, I drive a battered Volvo, and my social life revolves round tending this manky-looking allotment. I look like a geriatric rabbit with special needs, and have a wardrobe that Susan Boyle would raise a quizzical eyebrow at. Oh and I’ve spent my entire adult life married to the Tolkienesque-looking Jim Broadbent at his most annoyingly jovial and hand-knitted-jumpery.

Passing Viewer - Christ alive. You poor, poor cow.

Geri – (wisely) No, you don’t understand. Everyone envies me and my life. We’re the perfect middle-class couple. Everyone we know wants to be like us.

Passing Viewer – Fuck me backwards. What sort of sad freaks are you hanging out with?

Mary (staggering in wearing age-inappropriate pink hoodie, cackling hysterically and precariously clutching vast glass of white wine) Well, people like me for a start. Hello, viewers. I’m a desperate unhappy single alcoholic who longs for a man in my life. This is conveyed by the subtle means of Mike Leigh following me around with a big sign saying ‘DESPERATE UNHAPPY SINGLE ALCOHOLIC WHO LONGS FOR A MAN IN HER LIFE.’ And an enormous great fuck off arrow pointing at my head.

Geri (wisely) Well, we’re all like that in this film, dear. Mike Leigh gets universally praised for his subtle three-dimensional characters, which is a bit like praising the late Bernard Manning for his racial sensitivity and brilliance at the hundred-metre hurdles. There’s not a single, solitary one of us who’s more than a lazily snipped-out paper-thin cut-out with a few words scrawled on it with a biro. If you look closely, you can see that me and my husband have ‘nice cosy middle aged couple’ written on us. And that sad lonely fat bloke we hang out with sometimes has ‘sad lonely fat bloke’ written on him.

Mary (swilling back more white wine) I’m so unhappy. I hate my life. Why can’t I be in a decent film instead of this breathtakingly overrated pile of old poo? And don’t even get me started on the funereal pace. My granny moves faster than this thing, and she’s dead.

Tom (jovially) Cheer up, Mary. Listen to this dialogue. Mike Leigh’s universally acclaimed for his lifelike conversations, which he achieves through encouraging his actors to improvise and randomly make up things that sound like real dialogue.

Mary (swigging more wine) - Yeah, but the thing about real dialogue is that it’s fucking dull - and just wanders about aimlessly for hours on end like an old lady with Alzheimers who’s forgotten where her house is. You think Billy Wilder wrote the sparkling screenplay for Some Like It Hot by getting a bunch of tiresome old luvvies to talk shit among themselves for an hour?

Mary (wisely) Well, Some Like It Hot didn’t have as much artistic credibility as a Mike Leigh film. Because it wasn’t all filmed in suicidally depressing-looking shades of corpse grey and drab olive green, and didn’t have so many long boring silences.

(long boring silence)

And it didn’t have as many banal pointless remarks about fuck all, that are supposed to be funny in a wry understated English way, and are actually about as funny as Victoria Wood on Mogadon. On Mogadon.

Tom (jovially) I see the weather’s nice again.

(long boring silence)

Geri (wisely) For the time of year, I dare say.

(long boring silence)

Tom (jovially) Want some tomatoes, Mary? We grew them on our allotment.

(long boring silence)

Geri (wisely) Critics love this sort of thing. Oh, Mary, please don’t cry.

Mary (swigging down wine and sobbing hysterically) I’m so bored I’m struggling to keep my eyes open, and I just managed to check my watch, and we’re not even halfway through the bloody thing yet. And I paid eleven quid for this shit. And I’ve finished all my popcorn. Why do I never learn from my mistakes in life?

Geri(wisely) Oh Mary. There there.

Mary – (swigging down white wine) And why is everyone in this film so fucking ugly? The last time I saw such a cosmetically challenged cast, I was watching Tod Browning’s Freaks. Christ alive, I’m the best looking person here by a street and a half, so it’s kind of ironic that I’m the one who can’t get a man. In Mike Leigh Land, I should be the acknowledged Megan Fox of the ‘hood, just because I don’t scare small children and nervous horses.

Son (amiably) Hello, I’m the cosy nice couple’s son. I’m supposed to be a nice eligible attractive young man way out of the predatory drunk single woman’s league, which is fucking ridiculous, because I actually look like David Cameron’s hideously deformed kid brother who’s spent the last thirty-five years eating cream buns in a hidden cellar. The casting director on this movie should be shot.

Mary – (swigging down white wine) For some inexplicable reason, I think you’re hot, although to be fair, there’s not much competition - if Quasimodo walked in right now, the standard of male totty in this room would actually go up a bit. But I’m an unhappy desperate single alcoholic, so I’ll flirt blatantly and embarrassingly with you while swilling back more white wine. Can I feel your big strong muscles? You’re a naughty boy! Jesus H Christ, would anyone really say that in real life? My flirting techniques would look crass, fake and unrealistic in fucking Hollyoaks.

Sad Fat Bloke (sidling up to Mary); In order to convey my tentative attraction to you and clumsy willingness to try and please you – which you foolishly reject out of hand – I’ll kindly offer to light your cigarette, only to have you snap ‘no thanks,’ contemptuously turn your back on me, and carry on your implausible flirting with David Cameron Jr. Then you can make a fuss about driving me home, and say you’d rather just drive the younger man on his own, and then you can say upfront you don’t fancy me and fuck off.

Son (amiably) On the subject of Billy Wilder again, his key to great scriptwriting was ‘make the subtleties obvious’ - but Mike Leigh clearly doesn’t believe in that. Mike Leigh believes in making the obviousnesses obvious, and then making them a bit more obvious, and then just saying what you’re hinting at flat out in the most boring, obvious way imaginable, just in case some five year old retard at the back didn’t quite get the point the first three times round. Yet this is all achieved without compromising an artistic vision of suicidal snail-paced boredom that Lars von Trier would be proud of – or the integrity of characters so richly nuanced and three-dimensional, they’re almost worthy of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbour.

Old Lady On Rainy Allotment – And now the subtitle says it’s Autumn - which means we’re just over half way through. I know, it feels like you’ve been sitting in the cinema for the last three days already. How in the name of crap did this get five stars in the Mail? Fuck alive, I wouldn’t have given it two.

Son’s New Girlfriend – Hello, I’m a nice friendly suitable girl who’s started going out with the Son. We’re very well suited, not least because I’m incredibly boring and look like a cow’s arse.

Mary –(swigging down white wine) I’m hurt and jealous. And you can tell I’m hurt and jealous because the director’s waving a huge sign over my head saying LOOK AT MARY, SHE IS HURT AND JEALOUS. And I’m rude to the son’s new girlfriend in a hurt and jealous way. And then I look hurt and jealous a bit more in a wordless close-up that feels about eight minutes long. Just in case anyone missed the point here, I’m actually very hurt. And jealous.

Son’s New Girlfriend – (amiably) Actually, you’re not that rude to me. Just a bit ratty. But so mind-bogglingly little ever happens in Mike Leigh Land that the most cursory and trivial put-down is greeted like the first plane flying into the Twin Towers.

Geri (wisely) – Now, some old relative of ours you’ve never seen or even heard of before has died, and we’re all off to the funeral. Just to liven things up a bit. Ever had to go to an under-attended funeral for some moth-eaten great-auntie you’d last seen when you were seven years old and didn’t know from a hole in the ground?

Tom (jovially) – Well, that funeral was a private box at Cirque du Soleil compared to this fucker. I swear to Christ, it feels like you’re watching it play out in real time.

Random Mourner - How the hell much longer before this shitty film ends?

Another Random Mourner - Fuck knows. Another year?

THE END

PriceWaterhouseCoopers : Whinger's List

2010-11-13T14:18:00.002Z

Oh for the love of God, ladies, get over yourselves.

'The impact of this incident on the women' indeed.

Want to know who's really feeling humiliated, devastated and traumatised about this PriceWaterhouseCoopers list?

The girls who weren't on the bloody thing.

J x

Valley of the Dolls

2010-11-08T17:19:00.002Z

When I was eleven years old, my massive city of Barbies – a sprawling community which had previously lived in happiness, and in some cases even splendour, across my bedroom – were forcibly driven from their homes, in scenes of terrifying devastation.

Most were driven into the savagely crowded ghetto of a very large cupboard in the spare room. Others, more fortunate - including those glamorous luminaries Rock Star Barbie, Rock Star Ken and Rock Star Skipper – fled to the sanctuary of my seven year old cousin’s house.

Their homes and possessions were sold, or handed over as lavish gifts to the faithful (the seven-year-old cousin again). All apart from one once-vibrant tenement block, which took up its previous function as a bookcase.

It was fucking traumatic.

My reason for perpetrating this horror? Not because I genuinely felt that I’d outgrown the dolls in question. I adored those dolls and the endless high-drama soap opera of their lives. My school life was so horrible – and my home life so crap – that my time with those dolls were pretty much the only thing I lived for.

Yet at the same time, the realization of what any of my peers would think if they saw my doll-infested bedroom squatted there in the back of my mind, and became increasingly impossible to ignore.

A terrible sense of lurking guilt and paranoia began to haunt me day and night. In the middle of assembly or double maths, I remembered those dolls in my bedroom with a shiver of guilt, paranoia and dismayed unease. What if someone found out about them? And my mother had no idea how to keep her mouth shut about anything. All that it would take would be for her to start talking to the wrong girl’s mum when she came to pick me up, and it was goodnight Vienna.

And it was far too easy to imagine my peers’ reaction of almost ecstatic disbelief if it got out at school that I still played with Barbies at the age of eleven. I’d never hear the end of it in my lifetime. I was already right at the bottom of the social scale. A revelation like that would take me to a whole new nadir nobody had ever previously equalled in the entire history of my school, my country and the human race - completely redefining the depths of unpopularity it was possible for one eleven year old child to attain.

Which could have done strange and nasty things to the space-time continuum, and nobody wants that.

I owed it to humanity en masse to lose those fucking Barbies.

And when the heartbreaking exodus had finished, I looked at my newly doll-free bedroom with mixed emotions. Relief, because I was now relatively normal at last, on a par with the rest of my peer group, with nothing to hide. Even in the unlikely and nightmarish event that the most vicious and popular girl in the year somehow came into my bedroom, she’d no longer see something as instantaneously damning as a severed head on the bedside table.

But beneath that relief, there was nothing but a deep aching feeling of disappointment and loss. Because for my own sake, I hadn’t wanted to get rid of my Barbies at all. If only the cold and judgmental wider world could have vanished into thin air, I’d have kept those dolls and cherished them, because I loved them very dearly indeed.

And their conventional socially-acceptable replacements - boy band paraphernalia, teenage magazines, lipsticks - seemed too pallid, dull and inadequate for words.

I’m reminded of this sad little story because – more than 20 years later – I’m feeling exactly the same way.

Except on this occasion, I’m not packing away Barbies, but dreams.

Dreams of the man I want and the relationship I want and the life I want. Dreams I know – but don’t feel – I’m much too old for. Dreams that people would laugh at if they knew.

Maybe the time’s come to embrace that dull empty unjudgeable doll-free room. And to dutifully fill the freed-up space with those normal socially-acceptable things you’re supposed to want, but just plain don’t.

I’ve been in a relationship for a while now. I haven’t written about it before, because I simply couldn’t find anything funny or relevant or thought-provoking to say about it.

He’s nice. He’s boring.

I hasten to add, lest you misunderstand me, he’s not boring because he’s nice. He wouldn’t be any more interesting if he was a total prick. I wouldn’t find him more sexy and fascinating if he stopped phoning me for two weeks, or if he called me drunk from a bar at two in the morning, or if he picked me up three hours late one evening smelling of skank.

Although part of me would actually be quite happy if this happened, because then my problems would be immediately solved. He’d lose his one and only selling point, and I’d dump him. And that would be all she wrote. As good old Joe Stalin once said in his wisdom, no man, no problem.

Briefly off-topic, the popular idea that women find niceness to be sexual Kryptonite (while the dicks have a monopoly on sexual charisma) is, for my money, the lamest thing since Shallow Hal attempted to convince us that beautiful women were evil monsters under the surface, while morbidly obese munters had true kindness and inner beauty. From this, I can deduce that the Farrelly brothers have clearly never been to the Croydon McDonalds on a Saturday afternoon, or they would have learned it’s eminently possible to be both butt-ugly and completely vile. You just have to apply yourself a little, that’s all.

Equally, it’s possible for a man to be nastier than Hitler’s evil twin and simultaneously duller than a wet weekend in Wolverhampton. Don’t believe me, look at the entire male cast of The Apprentice.

This man’s not boring because he’s nice. He’s boring because he’s boring.

We have conversations of awe-inspiring, John and Norma Major-esque banality. On one memorable occasion, we spent some time comparing the merits of brown and white bread.

He would never, ever, ever get the point of Bill Hicks, American Dad, Christopher Brookmyre, The Wire or Bizarre magazine.

Sexually, my will to live is crawling out of the bedroom window and abseiling down the wall outside a la Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. Having said that, I’m not one of those women who gets conveniently-timed headaches and says things like ‘oh, we haven’t had sex for a year, I just don’t have the desire any more’ – and I think that such women are frankly taking the piss. If you can get up at six on a freezing cold rainy morning to drag your arse into some poxy job you hate every minute of, you can bloody well shag your other half when it’s expected of you. It’s not rocket science.

Despite a depressingly high sex drive, he’s as vanilla as it gets - if sex was food, he’d want to eat a hearty meal three times a day, but would regard anything more exotic than shepherd’s pie with intense suspicion. I can guarantee you that any proposal to introduce any tip-of-the-iceberg stuff like handcuffs or nipple clamps would be greeted like a proposal to introduce dead bodies or kidnapped hitch-hikers.

And it’s not just that he wouldn’t be up for it, although I’m damn sure of that much too. Just as you don’t need to see Joe Pasquale playing Othello to realize it’s a terrible, horrible mistake best left unseen for all eternity, you don’t need to see this guy playing a dom. It’s just bad casting.

What’s on the table is reliability, stability and permanence. A decent conscientious hardworking man who doesn’t smoke, drink heavily, gamble or take drugs. Good, but not amazing, job. Nice, but not amazing, house. Not some dazzling edifice of wealth and glamour based on a rocking stack of debts, credit cards, second mortgages and dodgy investments, but a sturdy four-square structure built on rock. BMW as opposed to Ferrari. Hobbs as opposed to Chanel.

No dependent rug-rats making the place look untidy. Just enough baggage to show that he’s not a commitment-phobe. And keener on moving things along than me. And genuinely and actively looking to get serious.

The most seductive aspect of continuing this deeply dull and uninspiring relationship is simply this - not feeling constantly left out and the only one I know in my age group who’s still single. And having everyone visibly wondering what the hell’s wrong with me that I’m still on the shelf, when even the Karen Matthews lookalikes have managed to snag themselves a bloke by now.

And no more need to ever go on another sodding dating site – or go on another first date. Christ, that’s an alluring prospect.

No more giddy elation when Mr Glamorous, Romantic and Wonderful sweeps you off for a dream date at the Ivy, and that’s too bad.

But also, no more suicidal despair when you never hear from Mr Glamorous, Romantic and Wonderful after the second or third date. And that is not too bad.

Christ, what a depressing state of affairs. When the absolute best-case outcome you can imagine in life is ‘well, maybe this way I’ll have a bit less dramatically depressing shit to worry about. I’ll just have flat boring mediocre shit to worry about instead. Wahoo.’

Peter Pan knew what he was talking about.

Being a grown-up sucks.

J x

Stephen Fry : Food For Thought

2010-11-03T12:51:00.001Z

Okay. To those who still believe I’m wrong in agreeing with Stephen Fry that men en masse like sex far more than women en masse.

And who still think I’m writing from random illogical personal prejudice (as opposed to my arguments being backed up by everything from the romantic fiction bestseller charts to the statistics on sex crime, the hardcore-porn-DVD mailing lists and the collected works of Charles Darwin.)

Here’s a little question for you.

Meet Person A and Person B.

Person A and Person B both claim to just love the physical act of eating, and to be hopelessly addicted to pig-outs and basic gluttony.

Person A will eat at every available opportunity - anything and everything that presents itself. Ideally nice food of Nando’s standard or higher, but needs must when the devil drives. In a push, when seriously hungry, they’ll even resort to McDonalds double cheeseburgers, donner kebabs of dubious provenance, and pallid soggily-battered cod with chips like little paper bags full of pus.

Ideally, Person A aims for higher culinary things - and spends much of their leisure time poring over lavishly illustrated cookery books showing impossibly beautiful photographs of plumply bronzed and gleaming breasts and thighs.

But in the realistically lifelong absence of this sort of thing, they’re perfectly satisfied – nay very happy - to tuck into an American Hot. So long as it comes with extra black olives. And maybe a bit of garlic bread.

While Person B turns their nose up at any mass-produced food, feels physically sick at the concept of eating from a kebab van, and dismissively turns down the free vouchers from Pizza Hut which get offered to them on a daily basis.

Will happily go months or even years in between pig-outs when Michelin invites are thin on the ground - living on occasional lettuce leaves to prevent actual starvation.

And only ever really enjoys eating when they can get all dressed up for the occasion and eat at the corner table of the Fat Duck.

Now, Person B clearly does not like the simple, physical act of eating to anywhere near the same extent as Person A.

What they like is certainly connected to eating - the three-Michelin-starred restaurant experience, the delicate interplay of fine flavours and freshly sourced ingredients.

But it’s not just ‘eating’ per se.

So if someone comes along and says ‘A and B are both equally fond of eating, and anyone who says otherwise is a blinkered liar. And I know what I’m talking about, because I saw Person B really enjoying the pan-fried muskrat with rosemary and caviar jus in Nobu five months ago.’

Then I’m going to tell that person they’re full of shit.

Person B may well be a greater gourmet, with a superior appreciation of fine ingredients and their magical infinity of combinations, and a keener, subtler, more educated culinary palate.

And Person B may well get greater, richer, more complex sensual delight from their occasional finely chosen mouthful than Person A’s mindless gluttony will ever provide.

But if the question is simply ‘who likes eating more’ - there’s no comparison whatsoever.

I could make the same point with the question ‘who likes boozing more?’ Someone who ravenously downs four litres of anything they can get their mitts on on a nightly basis, up to and including aftershave? Or someone who relishes a few glasses of glorious vintage Margaux on special occasions and Christmasses, and turns their nose up at anything that hasn’t been gathering dust in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s wine cellar for the last twenty years?

But I’m hoping that my message has been understood and received.

For as long as the question is simply ‘who likes sex more’ - not ‘who genuinely appreciates good sex more,’ or ‘who is capable of taking greater sensual pleasure in the exquisite delights and nuances of the act at its finest’ - the answer is, uncategorically, ‘men.’

The argument ends here.

Bite me.

J x

Rosie Boycott: Men From Mars, Women From Venus, Talking From Uranus

2010-11-02T10:21:00.001Z

I’ve never had any particular opinions regarding Stephen Fry before. Yet suddenly, on this topic of whether women like sex as much as men, we are one and the same. Temporarily, we have become Siamese twins. His supporters are my supporters. His critics are my own.

And it physically pains me to feel Stephen Fry banging his wise and venerable head on the wall when he reads ridiculous dumb-assed rebuttals like this one, by Rosie Boycott in the Daily Mail.

So I thought I’d answer it on his behalf (my comments are the ones in brackets):

NO, says ROSIE BOYCOTT - for women, love and sex go hand in hand

(We’re on my first ‘duh’ already, and we’re not even out of the headline. Please note Rosie Boycott’s use of the words ‘love and sex’. Stephen Fry wasn’t talking about ‘love and sex.’ He was just talking about sex. He said that sex was more important to men than it is to women. Not sex with love. Not sex with affection. Just plain sex. A cock and a hole. Wherever and whenever the opportunity for such a union presents itself. I’m banging my head on the damn wall already, and we haven’t even started.)

Much as I love Stephen Fry, he’s gravely mistaken in his ideas about women and sex. When I read them, I wondered if he had reverted to playing Jeeves, given just how hidebound and old-fashioned were his views. For the idea that young women (or old for that matter) don’t like sex is utter rubbish.

(For the love of Christ and my wall. He didn’t say young or old women didn’t like sex. He said we didn’t like having sex as much as men. Having sex purely for its own sake. Not in a romantic context, or an emotional context. Just having sex for the sake of having sex. Wherever. Whenever. Whether you’re looking your best or have shaved legs or have just washed your bits or have a nice romantic comfortable setting to do it in. Women impose caveats, worries and turn-offs that men wouldn’t even think about. Because men’s sex drive is massively, hugely, undeniably higher. Is this rocket science?)

Even if we look back to a time when women who had sex out of wedlock tended to keep quiet about it, there was no indication that women couldn’t and didn’t enjoy making love. If women liked sex as much as men, Fry says, there would be ‘straight’ cruising areas in the same way there are gay cruising areas. His implication is that heterosexual men would use such places as a matter of course given the chance, but that women would shy away from them. Honestly, what on earth does he think a bar is? Or a nightclub? Or a university union?

(Well, Rosie - very often, a bar or a club or a union is where women go in search of the things the vast majority care far more about than sex. Specifically, attention, admiration, demonstration of higher social status and desirability than the other girls, flirtation, flattery and potential long-term serious boyfriends. This is not the same thing as going out in search of sex. How many girls in clubs do you know that shags the first half decent guy who looks at them – as would happen in a gay sauna – and hauls them off to the bogs pretty much on sight, for their sheer raw animal biological desire is too high to resist?

(For every women that does this sort of thing (generally a drunk mangy cougar or a fat skank with self-mutilation scars), there are twenty more who are there in search of affirmation, free drinks, attention, admiration, envy, social status and flattery. And who has absolutely no intention of shagging anyone who hasn’t taken them out at least once or twice. As a general rule of thumb, the girls any man with eyesight would want to shag are not there to shag anyone. Ironic really, but dem’s da breaks.)

Of course, these places aren’t just about sex — they are where most of us meet the men we’re going to marry.

(For the love of fucking God and all the saints. You’re arguing my point for me, Rosie. My wall is developing a giant crater. My head is, too.)

For women, love and sex go hand in hand.

(Again, you’re arguing Stephen Fry’s case for him and you’re too stupid to even see it. ‘For women, love and sex go hand in hand.’ Ergo, women have little or no interest in loveless sex. In the basic physical act of shagging, irrespective of the partner and the place. Ergo Stephen Fry is one hundred per cent right. And so am I.)

Women adore men and the male figure.

(Some men, Rosie. Some male figures. If a slightly podgy plain woman goes up to ten straight men in a club and asks if they want to shag her in the bogs, I’m predicting a straight 100% take-up rate. If a plain podgy man approaches ten straight women in the same club with the same offer, I’m predicting the only action he’s going to get will consist of a kick in the nuts. Women are pickier about who they shag. Much pickier. And why? Because the straight physical act of having sex in itself is nowhere near as desirable a proposition to them.

(If this still doesn’t have those little grey cells of yours thinking about the radically different extent of male and female desire for JUST SEX - not sex with Mr Darcy, not sex in a four-poster bed strewn with rose petals, not sex with the hottest guy in the club, not sex with the boy all your friends fancy - JUST PLAIN SEX - you are in pathological denial.)

And Mr Fry seems to have forgotten that the female body is built for pleasure: there are thousands of nerve endings in the female sexual organs that allow women to have multiple orgasms in the way men simply cannot. So, as the saying goes, what’s not to like?

(Oh God, I’m not banging my head on the wall again. My next door neighbour’s started complaining. NOBODY’S SAYING WE DON’T LIKE IT. Just not as bloody often and not as bloody much as men do.)

Fry’s mistake is to assume that all women who sleep with men are doing it only because they want to get a ring on their finger, a new car or a bigger conservatory.

(Christ, he – and I - never said any such thing. Saying that our perfectly sensible and true argument ascribes mercenary or sinister motives to women is setting up a straw men deluxe. If I may speak for Mr Fry, we’re not saying women’s true motivation for having sex is always to do with acquiring money or rings or cars or conservatories. For a wealthy fiftysomething divorcee, the true motivation may be feeling loved, wanted and attractive again. For a fourteen-year-old girl, the true motivation may be having a proper serious boyfriend like the cool girls. But whether we’re talking about the elegant divorcee or the spotty schoolgirl, 99 times out of 100, she’s not just in it for the shag. This is so glaringly self-explanatory it’s making my head ache.)

How hopelessly outdated he is — and how little he knows about the fairer sex.

(And how lost in the wilds of denial you are).

Women can enjoy sex just as much as men.

(Yes, Rosie, they _can_ enjoy sex. All things being right in terms of time and place and lighting and partner. This is the whole point. Men don’t need the right time or place or partner to enjoy sex. They’ll enjoy having sex in a smelly public toilet with a woman they hate and who looks like Olive from On The Buses, just because they’re having sex. Saying women ‘can’ enjoy sex as much as men is like saying – given certain conditions, allowances, caveats and small print - girls ‘can’ do just as well in science as boys. And men _can_ be content in the home-maker role. Whether you realise it or not, the little word ‘can’ is actively acknowledging it’s the exception as opposed to the rule. )

My main worry is what’s happening with the younger generation. It is becoming more and more difficult for young women to learn to enjoy sex because some parts of the media, and much of the internet, seem to exist to make casual sex seem normal and desirable.

(Oh for the love of God, woman, you’re arguing Stephen Fry’s corner for him again. ‘Young women need to learn to enjoy sex.’ Why? Because they’re just not naturally that into it. Because Mother Nature and untold centuries of evolutionary biology have seen to it that the basic physical act of shagging doesn’t feel as automatically good to women as it does to men. Young men don’t ‘need to learn to enjoy sex,’ any more than they need to learn to shit or breathe oxygen. Because they just fucking do. Which is exactly what Stephen Fry was saying in the first place. *Sigh*.)

This means that boys are increasingly pressuring girls into sexual liaisons they simply don’t like, but they go through with it because they don’t want to seem ‘uncool’.

(And my point is proved yet again. Can you imagine a boy being pressured into a teenage heterosexual liaison he doesn’t like? Uh-uh-uh. If it’s a sexual liaison where his cock meets an available hole, he’s going to like it. And a woman won’t. Because men in general have far higher sex drives than women and want sex far far far far more. Do you ever get the feeling you’re talking to a brick wall?)

Teenage girls should be allowed to develop at their own pace, so that when they reach their 20s they can make their own choices about how they want to live. When I was young, I used to go to every rock concert I could find, met men I fancied and sometimes one thing used to lead to another. It certainly wasn’t prowling the public parks and heaths the way some people do today, but it was great fun.

(The crucial words here - ‘men I fancied’ and ‘sometimes’. From a man’s point of view, these caveats would not apply. The vast majority of them would shag whoever. Always. Whether they found them particularly attractive or not. Because that’s just how they’re fucking wired by nature. And women aren’t.)

But I will stop my argument here, while I still have a wall. And a head.

(Don’t agree? Think I’ve been unfair about Rosie Boycott? Share your views. Please mark your email DEAR JULIETTE, I WANT TO MAKE YOU BASH YOUR HEAD AGAINST THE WALL A FEW DOZEN MORE TIMES SO YOUR HEAD FINALLY POPS OUT ON YOUR NEIGHBOUR’S SIDE LOOKING FOR ALL THE WORLD LIKE YOUR NEIGHBOUR SHOT YOU ON SAFARI.)

Now, I’m off to sort out a decent plasterer to tend to my wall.

And while I’m at it, an ambulance to tend to my fractured skull.

J x

Stephen Fry : You Heard It Here First

2010-11-01T12:42:00.002Z

Stephen Fry, you utter bastard.

Stop stealing my shit.

Okay?

J x

PS - Laurie Penny, wind your neck in. When the man’s right, he’s right.

I really feel for old Stephen Fry on this, because when I wrote much the same thing way back when, I got much the same kind of vacuous, taking-my-arguments-way-out-of-context, straw-man, knee-jerk, river-in-Egypt, grrl-power, never-mind-the-overwhelming-general-rules-look-at-the-random-occasional-exceptions bullshit in response.

ike Stephen Fry, I wasn’t saying that women hated sex. Or that they only ever did it for money. Just that – unlike men – it wasn’t their primary motivation in any way, shape or form whatsoever. Exhibit A – the lack of demand for heterosexual male hookers. Exhibit B – the rarity of female-on-male rape.

As a basic general rule, and with obvious exceptions in the huge diverse throng of multi-faceted humanity, men use money, romance or emotional security to get sex.

As a basic general rule etc etc etc etc, women use sex to get money, romance, or emotional security.

Don’t like it, tough shit. Move to Mars.

The X Factor And Other Demons

2010-10-28T12:45:00.002+01:00

When I was at primary school, I remember that the vast majority of us kids had access to the grand total of four channels. As a result, any halfway major TV event would have about 95% of the audience glued to their seats – while the other 5% videoed it to watch the next day.

So everything from a soap opera death to a new sitcom would bring everyone together in the shared pleasure of communal viewing. Even if you were technically watching it at home on your own, you could rest assured that you’d be swapping fond or scathing reviews with everyone you knew in the classroom the next morning.

This, for me, is as nostalgic a childhood memory as Um Bongo, He Man And the Masters Of The Universe, Granny’s Garden and Beadle’s About.

People slag off the 80s, but it was the shit.

So I have mixed feelings that the one and only show that gets this sort of audience these days – literally the one and only thing you know that just about everyone at work will have watched on Monday morning - is The X Factor. Even The Apprentice doesn’t get an audience like this. And The Apprentice is about a thousand times better.

Just to clarify, I don’t hate Simon Cowell, or object to his vast wealth. There’s no reason why I should, as he’s not taking any of it off me. I don’t phone into the obviously-fixed-so-it-doesn’t-go-against-the-most-potentially-profitable-candidate vote-ins. I don’t text into the stupid rigged right-before-the-ad-break X Factor competitions, where you’re supposed to win an all-expenses paid trip to New York, but actually just win an insanely high mobile phone bill.

I also don’t buy shitty albums by the likes of Joe McElderry or Alexandra Burke.

And since ITV isn’t dependent on the archaic and ridiculous TV licence (which must seem as surreal to the Americans as needing a licence to own a chair), I’m damn sure I’m not, and never have been, making the man any richer.

This is market-forces democracy in action, and fair play to the man – if you don’t like him and are annoyed by his lavish lifestyle, you don’t have to contribute a single penny of your income to maintaining it. All public donations to the Simon Cowell money machine are made on an entirely voluntary basis.

Now, if only one could say the same thing about the Royal Family.

(It’s very similar to how I feel about Wayne Rooney, off topic. As one who couldn’t give two hoots about football and has never contributed a single penny towards swelling the coffers of the beautiful game, I couldn’t give a tin whistle if young Mr Shrek is earning a million pounds a day from his self-financing industry - for the simple reason that it doesn’t affect my life in any way, shape or form whatsoever.

Yet from all the tabloid hate, you’d think Wayne Rooney was running an empire of sweat shops for consumptive third world toddlers - occasionally branching out into trafficking under-aged prostitutes and making lampshades out of human skin. I mean for fuck’s sake, the guy’s just making a shitload of money playing football and shagging a few chavvy orange pros now and again. He’s not selling arms to Mugabe or manufacturing land mines. Or breaking international law by illegally invading countries which just happen to have vast quantities of oil lying about, or facilitating torture with a nod and a wink while making long pious speeches about human rights. There are far worse people in this world than Wayne Rooney, and some of them are leading major superpowers. Get a fucking grip.

Although I really do love watching tabloid journalists in a pious moral-high-ground feeding frenzy over the Wayne Rooney millions. It’s a glorious spectacle, and not pathetically hypocritical in the slightest. I mean, I’m quite sure that if anyone offered, say, Jan Moir £250K a week to do the same old shit elsewhere, she’d shake her head earnestly, flinching in instinctive revulsion. ‘No, I’m afraid I can’t possibly countenance your offer. Not only would it be ethically wrong to betray my long-term employers, I couldn’t live with myself earning such an obscene sum of money when the rest of the country’s struggling to keep their heads above water. It would be immoral and grotesque and a vile spectacle of naked greed. In fact, I hereby demand that you cut my salary to the national average of 25K, and put the remainder towards plugging the national defecit.’

And If you look to the right, ladies and gentlemen, you can see a majestic herd of flying pigs migrating to the plains of the Serengetti.)

But back to the X Factor.

Just as I can’t generate any particular animosity towards Simon Cowell, I also don’t dislike Danni Minogue, because it would be like disliking magnolia paint. And I don’t dislike Louis Walsh, because he’s got a lovely Irish accent, and having a lovely Irish accent automatically makes you warm and whimsical and cuddly and hard to hate. It’s really amazing how good the Irish are at all this PR malarkey. They ought to charge the Muslims for lessons.

And I don’t dislike Cheryl Cole, because she’s so drop-dead off-the-charts stunning, it’s impossible for any woman to openly dislike her without sounding like a bitter jealous dog. (Incidentally, if you’re one of those women who say in mixed groups ‘it’s all hair and makeup with her, I could look just as good with that much money’ - a word of advice. When you say this sort of thing in mixed company, the only reason why the men in the group don’t laugh in your face and leave you feeling about two inches tall for the next three weeks is because they’re too bloody nice. And sooner or later, one of your audience won’t be. You’re on borrowed time. So please, stop. Now.)

Yet while I have no animosity for any of The X Factor’s judging panel, the fact is that I dislike the show itself more and more with every passing day. A bit like George Osborne.*

Not because it’s damaging to society. If you look to reality TV for your social conscience and moral values, you’re a dick anyway. And God knows, it’s more morally viable than the old talent shows back in the day. At least it hasn’t discovered Jim Davidson and launched him on the world - a breakthrough about as welcome and socially beneficial as discovering and launching genital warts.

Nor because of the ‘think of the children’ angle. Really, you don’t have to worry that watching the X Factor is going to make your little angels judgmental, status-obsessed and vicious. Kids don’t need any help becoming judgmental, status-obsessed and vicious. The vast majority have a raw and startling natural genius in these areas already. Remember your playground days?

No, my problem with The X Factor is altogether simpler and less high-minded.

it’s just that it’s totally and irredeemably fucking awful.

‘Ah, but it’s great entertainment,’ I hear you say. ‘You can’t deny that.’

Sometimes, this argument can lull me into an unwilling nodding-dog sort of response, as can other bits of well-whether-you-like-it-or-not philistine wisdom. Like when people say ‘well it may not be culture, but you can’t deny that Jeffrey Archer’s a great storyteller. Or that Michael Bay’s a good director.’

Except when suddenly, something goes ‘click’ in my mind, and I realise I’m unwillingly nodding in agreement with complete nonsense, and I finally feel compelled to speak up.

‘Hang on a minute. No, Michael Bay isn’t even remotely a good director.

‘Not if you’ve got an IQ above room temperature.

‘He’s a fucking appalling director.

‘The one and only thing Michael Bay has going for him as a director is the simple fact that a lot of people are total fucking idiots who wouldn’t know a decent movie from a twenty-foot pile of exploding cat shit.’

Some things achieve huge mass-market popularity because they’re exceptionally good – and happily, sometimes true quality achieves widespread recognition.

On this side, I’m putting Innocent smoothies, Harry Potter, Andrew Lloyd Webber, The Office and Stephen King.

Other things achieve huge mass-market popularity because the world is full of tasteless slack-jawed knuckle-dragging cretins - and every single one of these Morlock-like creatures has the cultural vote.

On this side, I’m putting McDonalds, Twilight, High School Fucking Musical, Little Fucking Britain and Dan Fucking Brown.

And no prizes for guessing which side I’m putting The X Factor on.

Everything about it is fucking awful.

I’ve gone into all the whys and wherefores of my X Factor hatred before. And because I really hate repeating myself and duplicating posts on here, I won’t go through the same old list again when I can just link to it. Or, better yet, not bother. Because I can’t find it. It’s in the archives somewhere, if you want to have a look.

But this season, we can add the intelligence-insulting belief that we won’t know that Cher Lloyd (a young lady who bears an extraordinary resemblance to a terminally ill Cheryl Cole with a crap makeup artist and the world’s worst hangover) is personally responsible for her rap mash-up of Hard Knock Life from Annie.

‘I really love what you did with that song. It was so creative and original and unique,’ Cheryl and the other judges enthused.

Clearly speaking in the breathtakingly contemptuous assumption that all their viewers are cretinous nitwits with zero musical knowledge and goldfish-like memories - who don’t have access to Google Search, and wouldn’t know how to use it even if we did. And therefore have no idea that the exact same song was done the exact same way by Jay-Z.

(Although in Cher Lloyd’s defence, she brought something new to it in the form of dancing like a disturbed anorexic pisshead who’s just realizing someone stuck an eckie in her last double vodka.

Also, the unbelievably fucking annoying stage-school gurning was hers alone. So you know, credit where it’s due.)

Then again, you can’t really blame the programme makers for thinking like this. I daresay they’re operating under the quite reasonable assumption that - if the viewing public weren’t total and utter fucking retards - we wouldn’t be watching this crap in the first place.

And then there’s the identikit forgettable blandness of all the acts.

It’s like being shown ten streaks of piss on a wall, with the expectation that you’ll bite your nails worrying which one will get washed away at the end of the show.

You know it’s come to something when this year’s crop of wannabees make Joe McElderry look like John Lennon. There’s more star quality on view at my local Job Centre Plus.

Hate the X factor, anyway.

Although I do think it’s quite funny that, for an entire generation, ‘Wagnerian’ will now mean ‘reminds me of that man who looks like Robert Downey Junior playing a disturbed tramp who’s just raided Julio Iglesias’ wardrobe…’

J x

*Not as much, obviously. But then again, I don’t hate anything in the world as much as George Osborne. Except maybe Ugg boots.

By George

2010-10-21T12:59:00.001+01:00

Well, Constant Reader, Halloween has come for me ten days early – as I woke up to find images of this charming man plastered all over the bloody news stands. They really ought to give you some sort of warning.

As I recently said in the comments section, I hate George Osborne more than anyone else in the Tories. Which means in politics. Which means in the world.

Up till now, I never really understood people who had strong feelings about specific politicians. The way I saw it, politicians were all more or less the same, like cockroaches or X Factor finalists. In my opinion, all sensible folks realised that – whether the man with the rosette on his lapel ostensibly stood for burning single mothers at the stake or hugging socially-excluded gay bunny rabbits - he really stood for two things alone. One, getting elected. Two, getting rich(er).

To paraphrase Terry Pratchett’s wonderful book Small Gods, my political philosophy was a mix of the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans, and was definitively summed up in my famous maxim – ‘you can’t trust any of the buggers as far as you can throw ‘em and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink.’

George Osborne, you have changed that for me - Cameron too, but mostly your good self. After full decades of flat indifference, you have made me personally engage with politics at a passionate, visceral, personal level. At last, I truly understand why certain people still hate the long-deposed Thatcher so much, they dream of lining up at her funeral and pissing on her grave. In the happy event that young Master Georgie* dropped dead tomorrow, I’d be lining up for pissing rights too.

George Osborne, Rest In Piss.

Luckily, there probably wouldn’t be quite as much of a pissing queue as there will be for Maggie - although give it a few years and I predict it’s going to look like the first day of the January sales.

Please don’t try and engage me in a logical debate on this subject. At a rational, cerebral level, I know there’s a very good argument to say George Osborne’s only doing what had to be done anyway, and if Labour had got back in they’d have ended up doing much the same things, and the real underlying problems were caused by Gordon Brown etc etc etc.

You’re wasting your breath as much as the people who try to tell me spiders are nice harmless unthreatening creatures who perform a vital service in keeping down flies.

The plain fact is, I just fucking hate them.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite so easy to kill George Osborne with a well aimed Stephen King hardback, although God knows you could have some fun trying.

To change the subject, and to try and get that man’s horrible face out of my mind – I have to say that this (equally horrifying) story truly astonished me.

As when I first heard about it, I would have bet dollars to doughnuts that - at the eleventh hour - they’d mysteriously find that some vital bit of evidence had gone missing, or a key witness had withdrawn his testimony because he suddenly realised he couldn’t remember after all. And the whole trial would be straight down the toilet.

And a few senior police officers would be mysteriously driving about in new Aston Martins with the number plates THANK U a few days later.

It’s all too rare that my cynicism is proved too cynical. Usually, and sadly, it turns out to be quite a lot less cynical than real life.

So, you know – yay, British justice! Woo! Yeah! Etc etc.

(They do these spontaneous-enthusiasm things so much better in the States.)

Although having said that, celebrations may be premature. That cynical part of me remains quite sure that this sentence will go the way of all good things. And that – following some major oil deal with his billionaire family - the Fresh Prince of Bel Marsh will be quickly and mysteriously extradited to serve out the rest of his sentence in Saudi Arabia.

Where of course, he will be locked up in an ordinary Saudi Arabian prison for the full duration of this twenty year sentence, and then closely monitored so that he is never able to commit such a horrific crime ever again (it may be less embarrassing for all concerned if his lawyer can say that at the hearing without bursting out laughing… the spirit of Baltimore’s own Maury Levy is alive and well and charging £500 an hour.)

But anyway, it made me think.

If I was a gay man, I’d actually be quite pleased about this story PR-wise.

Because the relentless cutesy Cosmopolitan-sipping, ankle-crossing, acerbic-fashion-advice-dispensing stereotype would get right on my damned nerves.

Gay men are entitled to be just as hateful, frightening, violent, evil and sadistic as straight men.

‘It’s not all about interior decoration and pastel colours and show tunes. Some of us like inflicting sick exploitative sexual abuse too, you know.’

I remember seeing the movie The Krays long ago, and thinking that – as a gay man – I’d be downright delighted by its unstable knife-happy boyfriend-beating gangster.

Finally, a portrayal that didn’t depict a gay man as a flouncy interior decorator with a sharp tongue and a heart of gold. Involved in an apparently asexual, bickering-but-cutesy relationship with an identical man who had a slightly different hair colour, and walking round hand in hand with him looking like a couple of permatanned dickless Ken dolls in cashmere sweaters.

Or as the sexually neutered best friend of a tiresome bony fashionista, who had nothing better to do with his time and sexuality than listen to the boring self-obsessed bitch drone on about shoes all day.

What if he’d rather be out fisting a vulnerable teenage runaway who’d offered to suck them off for five quid, then leaving his critically injured body for dead down an alleyway?

Equal rights means equal rights to be a despicable scumbag.

Blanket-positive statements about a specific minority group always strike me as being every bit as offensive as blanket-negative ones. ‘Oh, gay men are so lovely and stylish and funny and sweet. ‘ No they’re not. Some of them are fucking horrible. Some of them have the fashion sense of the Latvian entry in the Eurovision Song Contest. Christ, some of them are Peter Mandelson.

It reminds me of Julie Burchill’s endless well-documented obsession with all Jewish men being charming, handsome and irresistibly sexy.**

Call me a po-faced Guardianista, but I couldn’t help finding this downright racist.

In today’s enlightened times, Jewish men have every bit as much of a right to be boring butt-ugly obnoxious wastes of space as anyone else.

And so do gays.

Off-topic, this case is clear proof that the ass isn’t any greener on the other side of the fence. It made me think of certain woman-hating sites that I shall not mention, where all things cruel, predatory, duplicitous, toxic and vile are assumed to be inherently female.

If a magic wand could be waved to turn these men gay immediately, the men in question would be in for a very nasty shock.

‘Shit. Men are fucking horrible exploitative uncaring two-faced manipulative boring conceited ugly liars too. And violent with it. And I still can’t get a shag.’

By the way, words haven’t been invented to describe how much I love this song. Wonderful voice, haunting melody and the lyrics are just great. I could have written it myself in my teenage years, if (and it’s a pretty big if) I’d been able to write brilliant songs. Have a listen.

J x

*Title of a Beryl Bainbridge book, and one which really, really suits Mr Osborne. Lest you think there’s something kinky going on here, I don’t mean it suits him in the sense of ‘Master Evil commands that you kneel and obey.’ I mean it suits him in the sense of ‘now eat up your mutton stew, Master Algernon, or Nanny won’t give you any treacle pudding.’

**Maybe it was wrong of me to wish she’d find herself stuck in a lift with Gerald Kaufman and both Miliband brothers for five and a half hours. But come on, you’ve got to admit it would be funny.

Get Some Nuts

2010-10-20T12:34:00.001+01:00

After reading this article and its spectacularly po-faced wankfest of comments (have a scroll through them when you’ve got a minute – you’ll think you’re reading a vicious parody of all things Guardianesque) I found myself musing on the pros and cons of lads’ mags.

Now, I really can’t get that bothered about lad’s mags. For a start, I read and enjoy a couple of primarily male-oriented titles myself. From my last post, you already know about my Bizarre habit, and I’ve got an even more embarrassing fondness for Viz - a magazine that has more genuine wit in its scruffy little finger than Private Eye has in its whole pompously waddling Paul Smith-clad body.

And when I once came across a copy of Zoo – or it may have been Nuts - on the train, I read it with some curiosity. And I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised. From where I was sitting, the genuine venom, sadism, bitterness, hatred and all-round misogynistic creepiness that characterise sundry MRA sites of this world were quite notable by their absence in this chirpy little magazine.

In its general attitude to sex and women – breathtakingly crass, shamelessly shallow, a bit naïve, fundamentally harmless – the magazine in question reminded me of nothing so much as the Inbetweeners. And I like the Inbetweeners.

Admittedly, its readers and writers clearly aren’t particularly interested in their models’ three-dimensional humanity. And it would be nice if their admiration for Juicy Jeni’s physical charms could be matched with a mature and considered respect for her as an individual and autonomous human being worthy of respect and equality.

But for fuck’s sake. We’re talking about lads here. Lads’ Mags. The clue’s in the name.

You don’t need to be some sort of marketing genius to realise that a lad’s mag that launched with a cover image of a fully dressed Zadie Smith, its brash cover come-on lines promising more explicit fare within (Gender Equality! Sexual Respect! Non Intimidating Aesthetic Appreciation Of Our Social and Intellectual Equals!) would have the life expectancy of a cheese and pickle sandwich.

And I actually liked the page of sick jokes about paedos, and the photos of five-legged mutant lambs, and the stories about guys who’ve had their dicks chopped off by vengeful yazuka. What can I say? I’m young at heart. About eight.

Naked women aside, it was a considerably better read than the blandly vapid, neutered crap us girls are stuck with – the Cosmos and Glamours of this world are just as stupid and shallow as any lad’s mag in the world, without the entertainment value. All the glossy women’s mags on the market resound with the ruthlessly upbeat and formulaic joylessness of an American self-help bestseller – and, like the Godawful Sex and the City, play right into the hands of men who claim women are stupid shallow bitches with no sense of humour.

It reminds me of a time when an ex of mine said women just weren’t funny and female stand ups were crap.

My immediate impulse was to argue furiously, but then I started thinking and fell silent.

There’s Victoria Wood, who I find as amusing as 9/11. Jenny Eclair, who I find less amusing than 9/11. Shazia Mirza, by comparison to whom, 9/11 was a work of comic genius.

After about five minutes of increasingly alarmed searching through the pockets of my mind, the absolute best I could come up with was Jo Brand.

And credit where due, Jo Brand’s a funny woman and I think she’s great.

But expecting her to single-handedly take on the advancing hordes of Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, Bill Hicks, Jerry Sadovitz, Bill Bailey, Peter Kay, Russell Brand, Ricky Gervais, Michael McIntyre et alia is, I feel, asking a little too much of the lady.

Fuck it, when the misogynists are right, they’re right.

Yet I found the fabled misogyny of lad’s mags to be elusive to the point of nonexistence. I was even un-bothered by the notorious Danny Dyer advice column, which caused a firestorm of controversy at the time – as he advised a heartbroken male reader to get over his traumatic break-up by cutting his ex-girlfriend’s face ‘so no one else will want her.’

Now, I didn’t read it in context, and his remarks were certainly unpleasant, sick and tasteless to say the least. Yet every time I came across another Daily Mail columnist calling for Dyer’s head on a stick, I wanted to bash my own head against the wall.

JESUS CHRIST YOU NIT, IT WASN’T MEANT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY.

From everything I’ve read, it sounds like Danny Dyer’s advice column might as well have been entitled ASK A FAKE COCKNEY HARDMAN. Where a complaint about your unreasonable boss might be answered by advice to invite said boss for a pint at the Blind Beggar, then shoot him through the head and get some of the lads to bury him under a motorway flyover.

Anyone who’s going to slash their ex-girlfriend’s face up because they read it in an obviously-fake advice column was a very serious danger to society in the first place - and a disaster waiting to happen from the day they were born.

Luckily., such a person would likely already be serving life for sticking a coffee table up their mother’s arse, following some confusion helping a friend move into a new flat.

‘Well, I asked Darren where he wanted me to put it. I didn’t know he was joking, did I?‘

As for the ‘think of the children’ criticism of lads’ mags - whereby the fairy-like innocence of childhood will be irreversibly corrupted by glimpsing half-naked ladies on the lower shelves of WH Smith – I hate to break it to you, but you’re shutting the stable door after the horse has run off, lived a long happy life, dropped dead of old age and been sold for glue.

Putting paper bags over the copies of Nuts and Zoo on the shelves, so the kids won’t see them?

Well, it’s a start.

Now, all you need to do is get a really big paper bag and stick it over that giant billboard for Spearmint Rhino you drive them past on the way to school every morning. The one with the half-naked blonde, cleavage exploding from a school uniform white shirt, suggestively licking a lollipop alongside the headline NAUGHTY GIRLS.

And more paper bags over the suggestively-writhing female dancers on telly that you see every Saturday night hours before the watershed, and which are a regular feature of every family-entertainment show from Strictly to the X Factor.

And a paper bag over the TV when the incredibly explicit pop song that’s been number one for three weeks comes on. And one over the radio. And one over the sound system broadcasting the same song across the shopping mall on Saturday afternoon.

And paper bags over those girls in the playground, who’ve copied all the song’s sexual-as-a-porn-movie dance moves off the video, learned them off by heart, and are practicing them over and over again at lunchtime (when I was a little kid, the dance we all learned was from the video of Touch Me (I Want Your Body) by Sam Fox. Ah, those innocent Eighties.)

And then you can put a paper bag over your kid’s mate. The one whose folks have yet to master the arcane mysteries of Net Nanny, and in whose bedroom your little angel and his pals can stare wide eyed at pop-ups promising everything from Donkey Fuckers to Piss Drinking Whores.

To paraphrase Jaws, we’re going to need a bigger bag.

As far as I can see, the only possible way of protecting your kids from this kind of thing is to raise them on a remote desert island with no other children, no other adults and no warm-blooded mammals who might start shagging in front of your rug rat and make them ask awkward questions.

Even then, they’d probably go on your single-link-to-the-outside-world computer while you were off fishing for the evening meal, and be looking at hentai porn five minutes later.

Plain fact. By the time they hit six, your kids are going to see a shitload of sexually explicit material whether you want them to or not. Don’t like it, don’t have ‘em.

Anyway, no matter how hard I try, I can’t get particularly hot under the collar about lad’s mags. I can think of a fair few mass-market titles far more in need of culling than Nuts and Zoo. Personally, if I could wipe any single magazine off the face of the earth, it would be Tatler - that expensively produced and highly effective recruitment brochure for Al Qaeda. Hell, it makes me want to go to some Pakistan-based boot camp and emerge as a fully fledged suicide bomber with a pilot’s licence - if only in the hope that the building I fly the plane into might contain their April cover girl, It-girl-turned-model-turned-fashion designer Lady Araminta Titwank.

And if I’m really lucky, maybe I’ll also manage to bag that world-class cockwomble on page 32, who’s snootily droning on about the importance of buying a £40K watch in the middle of a fucking recession.

Compared to this sort of thing, lads’ mags are comparatively harmless.

Nuts to the haters.

J x

How Bizarre

2010-10-19T12:27:00.002+01:00

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Bizarre magazine. It’s a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine on long solitary train journeys. It’s got some extremely entertaining articles - which are well worth having to flick hastily past the occasional double-page spread of naked girls with vampire teeth and stage blood, apprehensive that my fellow passengers think I’m a well-disguised Goth lesbian.*

But anyway, it’s an ‘alternative’ magazine (the website’s here, if you’re interested – if it’s anything like the magazine, it’s probably not safe for work). It generally features stories such as people setting themselves on fire as an aspect of S and M play, dressing up in furry animal costumes to shag each other, having their teeth professionally sharpened, going to chainsaw juggling festivals and that sort of thing.

Hell, it always gives me a laugh.

Yet, when I was reading the most recent issue, I couldn’t help but notice an aspect of Bizarre that had somehow slid under the radar for me when I’d been reading it before.

Namely, its ‘alternative’ pin-ups.

Now, these are the pin-ups for guys who idolise Rob Zombie, and get their scrotums pierced, and want a giant skull tattooed on their back, and once paid five hundred pounds on eBay for an original artwork by John Wayne Gacy.

And I can’t help but notice how the objects of their lust are all under 25 and under 8 stone, with perfect skin, no visible body fat, and faces of impeccable full-lipped big-eyed high-cheekboned conventional prettiness.

Alternative pin-ups, my arse.

I mean, okay, credit where it’s due. The chicks are mostly alternative enough to have a visible tattoo on one skinny toned sunbed-tanned arm. And maybe a small silver ring through their cute little nose. And to make some oh-so-alternative comments in the attached interview about how they’ve always been turned on by vampires and fantasise about being wrapped up in clingfilm.

But let’s not get carried away here.

Of course, they’re not going to showcase some girl who’s ‘alternative’ enough to let their weight go over eight stone, or to have less-than-perfect tits, or to skip the gym for a couple of weeks. Or to have a funny nose or frizzy hair or freckles or something.

Fuck that shit.

What do you think this is, some sort of freak show?

And they’ve got this Ultra Vixens competition where female readers send in their photos for a shot at the alternative-modelling big time. I read that section with a combination of morbid fascination, deep aching sadness for humanity, and pitch-black humour. It’s the sort of thing where you either laugh or you cry.

Because there’s such a razor-sharp, crystal-clear division between the ones who get it and the ones who don’t.

The ones who don’t get it appear to be inspired by a pitifully misplaced belief, which has somehow managed to overrule the evidence of their own eyes, and the very magazine that’s staring them in the face as they copy down the address to send their photos in to. They actually, genuinely, sincerely believe that alternative modelling is all about creativity and guts and individuality and strangeness and looking unique. That any alternatively-minded girl with the right attitude and the right personality can be a Bizarre cover girl.

A bit like the American Dreamers who’ll tell their kids earnestly ‘anyone can become President.’

Leaving out the crucial rider ‘obviously assuming that he, she or it has access to a few hundred million dollars worth of campaign funds.’

These deluded young ladies’ photos appear in the monthly line-up of would-be Ultra Vixens like unpeeled potatoes in a fruit salad. Alongside the glossy, pouting, platinum-haired Scarlett-Johanssen-plays-a-sexy-biker-chick-with-an-arm-tattoo lookalikes, whose attached describe-yourself comments are disingenuous thinly-veiled wanker-friendly come-ons such as ‘every man who meets me falls in love with me – it’s my lifelong fantasy to be the girl in a bukkake scene.’

And then you get these ones who Just Don’t Get It. The pallid, scrawny ones with multiple facial piercings and lank green hair and bright pink eye shadow and arms like home-tattooed strands of spaghetti.

Whose comments are along the lines of ‘Having been bullied at school for looking weird, I have now discovered my true confidence and inner beauty - and know it’s okay to look different.’

Which is quite deliciously ironic, as you just know the oh-so-alternative Mohawked male art director promptly consigned their images to the bin marked ‘funny looking munters’ - never to be seen again.

All creative, daring, alternative grrls in tune with their sexuality are equal.

But some are more equal than others.

It’s yet another example of what I already knew. With a tiny, and I do mean tiny, handful of exceptions – those who actively prefer kids, old ladies or thirty stone Jabba the Hutt lookalikes - heterosexual male desire is absolutely fucking generic.

It doesn’t matter whether the man in question is a Methodist minister or a hedge fund manager or a coal miner or a seven-stone teenage Goth living in his parents’ basement.

Their ideal woman is just different models of the same achingly predictable Barbie doll.

Admittedly, this Barbie doll has dark hair and is dressed in a pinstriped suit and wearing glasses, and that Barbie doll is wearing a flowered Laura Ashley dress and no shoes and carrying a little plastic baby, and that Barbie doll has punky pink hair and black lipstick and a little rose tattoo on her toned brown plastic bicep.

But it’s the same damn Barbie doll.

It’s really irritating when I say things like this, because I can guarantee I’m going to get absolutely crucified for it. I will confidently bet you now – in the unlikely event that I get more than five responses to this post, two or more will be angrily saying that I’m prejudiced, dogmatic, ignorant, shallow, fucked-up, deluded, don’t know what I’m talking about etc etc etc…

Yet I seem to remember that, before I stopped reading his site many moons ago (on the grounds that he and his regular commenters were severely endangering my mental health – quitting smoking after 10 years was quite a bit easier) a certain gentleman named Roissy in DC said the absolutely exact same thing.

And he got hundreds of fucking adoring replies saying how fucking right he was, and how he understood the ugly truth of male desire better than anyone else in the fucking blogosphere.

For saying the exact same fucking things about men that I get fucking fucked for.

It’s enough to make a girl swear, I tell you.

Hate mail to the usual address…

J x

*Or, worse, a badly disguised Goth lesbian. Christ.

Who's A Pretty Boy Then?

2010-10-18T17:08:00.001+01:00

I was just reading this story about a young lady named Karen Owen, who compiled a Powerpoint presentation detailing the sexual pros and cons of her university’s male elite.

I’ve read various conflicting views on this Karen Owen’s character and motivations. Some say ‘sad and vengeful woman-spurned’ – others say ‘cold predatory slapper.’ But it’s all conjecture, assumption and good old-fashioned bullshit. It’s the story version of a Rorshact test, that’s just as conservative, liberal, anti-women, anti-men, pre-feminist, post-feminist, life-affirming or depressing as you want it to be.

However, there’s one undeniable fact in the equation. The fact that the young men Karen Owen sexually critiqued were significantly out of her league.

A quick Google search will make it abundantly clear that a fairly nondescript-looking female student solely targeted her uni’s athletic young gods - apparently drawn purely by their cheekbones, six-packs and physical perfection.

Like a female Shallow Hal, Karen Owen’s love life appears to have consisted of doomed one-night-stands with men so much better-looking than herself that they might as well have come from a different species – a form of making-life-needlessly-difficult-for-yourself sexual masochism I’ve always associated exclusively with men.

My question is - do women, en masse, really care about a man’s looks, muscle tone, and general resemblance to a Men’s Health cover boy? And do the vast majority of women really, genuinely want a man who’s better-looking than them?

I know we often say we do. The thing is, I can well believe that this means sod all, because I sometimes say this sort of thing myself. And if I may risk destroying the illusions behind this particular magic trick, these remarks are often made in a spirit of revenge rather than actual truthfulness.

The fact is, in the war between the sexes, men have all the firepower, all the mass-market media spin and all the outside support. It’s Israel v Palestine all over again, only without the Israeli justification of self-defence and survival. Barely a day goes past without their side of this awesomely one-sided battle carpet-bombing vast swathes of innocent civilians - look at her - too fat! look at her - too old! look at her - doesn’t look like a member of the Pussycat Dolls! – leaving a trail of rubble and devastation in their wake.

At the same time, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a group in possession of accepted social power must be in need of some cringingly desperate self-loathing sycophants to crawl up their arse twenty-four-seven in the vain hope of finally getting to sit at the cool kids’ table.

As a consequence, the male side of the battle manages to attract innumerable Uncle Toms from the female side - admittedly fairly dim, vicious and pathetic specimens to start off with - to do most of their dirty work for them.

Regular readers of Jan Moir or Liz Jones will know what I’m talking about.

So there’s not even any solidarity among our own bloody people.

Ergo, in our Palestinian role, it’s inevitable that sensible women with vague remnants of self-esteem are apt to get a tad pissed off, and in need of the liberating catharsis of retaliation.

And sometimes - morally objectionable as it may be - the only available course of counter-attack is creeping under the radar and attacking a few passing randoms with some well-timed incendiary remarks about midget dicks and what you’d like to do to Johnny Depp.

For this reason, I’d say that - whatever most women have to say about their preferences for Adonis-like physiques and nine-inch manhoods - any listening men would be advised to take it all with a generous pinch of salt.

I hasten to add, I’m not saying ‘if you’re a man, looks don’t matter.’ I have to make this unambiguously clear, lest it lends further fuel to a fire already raging out of control - the widespread, pernicious, lazy, complacent and utterly delusional male conviction that real men don’t do workouts and waxing is for wimps.

I am emphatically not saying that moobs are anything less than repulsive. Or that the typical forty-five year old male body is anywhere near as visually attractive as the typical twenty-five year old’s.

Or that – all other things being equal - any woman with half a brain is going to choose a moth-eaten donkey over a glossy young stallion on the grounds that the donkey’s mangy-looking greying coat makes it look so much wiser and more intelligent and more subtly powerful than its conker-shiny rival.

This is a popular male belief, and it’s also a well-known river in Egypt.

But when the moth-eaten donkey gets chosen over the glossy young stallion, you can bet your first-born child there’s cash involved.

Whatever the vast majority of you men may think about cellulite, stretch marks, saggy tits and untended bikini lines, you can rest assured that the vast majority of women feel just the same way about bitch tits, hairy backs, beer bellies and love handles. And as for jungle-like male pubes, don’t even go there. I threw up a little in my mouth just typing those words.

We’re just a bit more polite about telling you how revolting they are, that’s all.

I mean, we may not be as mind-meltingly shallow as you lot, but that doesn’t mean we’re fucking blind.

Yet when you take things to the other extreme, there’s a very real and definite difference between the sexes. Line up ten men and ten women on a physical-perfection scale of one to ten, and IMHO, pretty much all women – like pretty much all men - are going to choose the 7 over the 2 any old day of the week.

The difference is, I really think the vast majority of women I’ve ever known would actively prefer the 7 to the 10.

Whereas for the vast majority of men, it’s the exact opposite.

I was in Selfridges recently, and saw two guys walking past me. I assumed they were en route to some new aftershave promotion elsewhere in the store. This didn’t, it must be said, require the deductive powers of Baker Street’s finest, as they were wearing nothing but luminously white Y-fronts and flip-flops - not the typical male shopper’s garb of choice on an October afternoon. They were very, very obviously male models, as evidenced by their caramel-coloured suntans, statue-like hairlessness and extraordinary musculature. One was very pretty indeed. The other was downright godlike*.

I found it literally, physically impossible not to stare at them like a mentally retarded goldfish with my mouth half-open. From my peripheral vision, I could see other women reacting in a similar way.

Now, I obviously can’t speak for all those other women – for all I know, said women were blinded by raw physical attraction and desire. But from my point of view, while I couldn’t take my eyes off these men and their awe-inspiring bodies for about five seconds, it wasn’t lust by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t imagine it was anywhere near what a guy would experience with the genders reversed.

In my case, it was more a case of straightforward asexual jaw-dropping amazement that actual human beings could actually look like that without a helping hand from kindly old Mr Photoshop.
And in real life, I wouldn’t want a bloke like that, even if having one was an option. They’d probably live on wheatgrass shots and egg whites, and think that the controversial musical genius Wagner was that old git off the X Factor. And stare at you blankly if you mentioned any writer who wasn’t Tom Clancy or Dan Brown. And hog the bathroom mirror all morning. And make you feel like Anne Widdecombe standing beside her Strictly Come Dancing partner every time you walked into a room together. And generally be about as much fun to have around the place as a catatonic rabbit.

And IMHO, Strictly’s smirking, permatanned Gaston-a-like Gavin Henson is about half as erotic a spectacle as a mangled vole being eaten by a seagull**.

No, give me a nice-but-normal-looking bloke any old day of the week.

Although I think I’ll pass on the ear hair, thanks…

J x

*Way ahead of you on this one. If they were straight, I’m a monkey.

** Lacking, as he is, in the mangled vole’s primal Hemingway-esque savage majesty, and the dark sexually-charged cruelty of the animal world. Mangled voles just do it for me every damn time.

Shiteheads Revisited

2010-10-14T08:51:00.002+01:00

I always feel slightly bemused and short-changed when I read about the typical university experience. As if, all unbeknownst to me, I accidentally spent three years of my life in the wrong place. As if, in a parallell universe, some kindly acquaintance did a double take on day two of my fresher term, and said, with dawning comprehension, ‘oh, you signed up for that Wankfordshire Uni. The one with the ever-flowing red wine, and the impassioned late-night discussions about Baudelaire, and the Bohemian free love with palely beautiful young men. And the unstable, reckless, charismatic geniuses dancing on a fraying tightrope between brilliance and insanity. And the dangerous-yet-irresistible flirtations with Class B drugs.

‘Ah, that’s the one down the road. The Gormenghasty-looking job with all the ivy. You want to turn left when you see some hauntingly beautiful young Ancient Greek scholars in togas standing over the body of a farmer they’ve accidentally murdered during a frenzied bacchanal, and wondering what the hell they’re going to do about it now.

‘No, this is the suicidally banal, pointless, crap Wankfordshire Uni. The one for dead-eyed upper-middle-class Pony Club zombies called Caroline and Alice, who work to the same uninspired yet neatly conscientious standard that gets you pretty gold stars in your exercise books at primary school. And spend three and a half hours discussing their suicidally uninspired choice of dresses for the summer ball. And drink three Bacardi Breezers on a particularly reckless Saturday night. And cough pointedly at you if you light a cigarette within five feet of them.

‘You’re in the wrong place, love. Sorry.’

But nobody ever told me, so I was bloody well stuck there.

There were many things I disappointingly failed to encounter at uni. Golden-haired, irresistibly charming and camp-as-a-row-of-pink-tents young lords carrying teddy bears. Erudite eccentric elitist cliques rocking the absent-minded professor look round campus a la The Secret History. If Henry Winter had turned up at one of my lectures in his dark English suit and furled umbrella, the entire assembled lecture hall would have turned and stared at him until he turned tail and ran off. I mean, Jesus, I was regarded as a sartorial eccentric to rival Isabella Blow on the grounds that I routinely wore nail varnish*.

What can I say? Just born to be wild, I guess.

I also didn’t encounter the fascinatingly diverse student population you’re supposed to come across. If you check out the demographic profile of my graduation year at uni, you’ll see that 0.1% of their student body came from a single parent family, 0.1% of their student body had an annual household income below £80K, 0.1% of their student body had tried drugs or heavy drinking prior to their fresher term, and 0.1% of their student body came from a mixed race background.

Interestingly, the year after I left, you’ll see those figures all went down to 0.0%.

They were at 0.0% the year before I arrived, too.

Funny thing, that.

Now, I’m not saying that the vast majority of kids I met at uni had led a mind-bogglingly sheltered, pampered, piss-easy life or anything. Or that the overwhelming majority were 18 going on six and a half. These kids had suffered, I tell you. Behind the Tunbridge Wells pod people façade, there was some righteous trauma going on. When I’d known one of the most egregious of the university princesses for some time, she told me about the worst thing that had ever happened to her – and conceded that she still sometimes cried about it today.

Her cat had been run over when she was fourteen.

Now, that’s the sort of memory that the Ed Geins of this world wake up from screaming.

So it’s a tribute to this girl’s superhuman strength of character and emotional resilience that she managed to pass so effortlessly as a blandly vapid simpering zombie who made Kate Middleton look like Janis Joplin and didn’t know she was fucking born.

Another thing I didn’t encounter at uni was people who gave a tin shit about their subject, or who had any genuine affection for it whatsoever - beyond joylessly ploughing through all the set texts, and then joylessly ploughing through impeccably laid out and double-spaced essays dutifully regurgitating their lecturer’s carefully-noted-down opinions right back at him without an original thought to be seen. (Fuck The History Boys. Real academics love this shit. Especially if you attach a five-page-long bibliography to the end of it.)

In three solid years, I didn’t encounter the slightest flicker of interest in current affairs, or politics, or feminism, or pretty much anything else apart from crap middle-of-the-road indie bands, overpriced pink and white trainers, and dickish boys with floppy hair and zits. Even occasionally reading a newspaper was regarded with intense suspicion. I’m not sure if half of them knew who the PM was. They were big on Hollyoaks, mind. Fucking huge on Hollyoaks. And if you wanted to know which Monsoon dress Emma from St Fucktard’s Hall was thinking about wearing to the summer ball, you could rest assured you were in the right place.

When I watched Educating Rita after leaving uni, I couldn’t help smiling to myself.

If the uni she went to was anything like the uni I went to, Rita would have had significantly more chance of having an interesting conversation with lively intelligent switched-on people if she’d stayed working at the fucking hairdressers.

The only new and interesting things I did encounter at university were an insane number of people with weird allergies and food intolerances I’d never even heard of before. I mean, yeast intolerance. For fuck’s sake.

(Before I get a hail of complaints, I’m sure there are some yeast and wheat and lactose intolerant souls who live in the ghetto, have never been to a private nutritionist in their lives, and only discovered their ailment because every time they devoured a mouldy crust of bread from the gutter, they keeled over in a dead faint and woke up to find they’d had a kidney nicked.

And aren’t just whiny overprivileged attention-seeking nitwits, whose retarded Home Sweet Home Counties cupcake-baking mummies had nothing better to do with their time than launching ruthless CIA-worthy investigations into any elusive suggestion of bloated stomachs or temporary constipation - finally framing a perfectly innocent glass of milk that happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.)

I also remember university being characterised by a quite extraordinary sense of boredom, irritation and pointlessness - which, to add insult to injury, I knew damn well I’d have to pay good money for in the not-so-distant future. It was like sitting in the back of a cab in gridlocked traffic, staring out at a rainy featureless wasteland, and watching the meter inexorably tick up to fifteen grand.

As you can probably tell, my memories of uni are less than idyllic. And looking back, all the good bits had fuck all to do with being at uni and everything to do with being eighteen.

And all this means that I can’t get all militant and furious about this recent funding-higher-education, poor-kids-are-going-to-be-priced-out-of-the-market controversy business.

Because IMHO - unless you’re planning to study medicine or law or suchlike - university is a complete and total waste of time anyway.

I can tell you from personal experience that even a good humanities degree from one of the country’s top ten universities carries about as much weight with potential employers as a torn-off sheet of A4 paper with a smily face drawn on it with a biro.

So if you’re of the generation that’s about to find yourselves priced out of the university market, be of good cheer. Because there’s a 99% chance that you’re missing out on sod all but a load of debts.

Although, to be fair, you have missed your chance to hear words of wisdom from some of the foremost Hollyoaks and The Hills scholars of their age. And your knowledge of Monsoon formal dresses may remain forever lacking.

But dem’s da breaks.

J x

*Although in my peers’ defence, it was red nail varnish. And I sometimes wore shoes that weren’t trainers, too.

Writer's Block

2010-10-04T13:27:00.001+01:00

Sorry it’s been a while, but I’ve been afflicted by problems. Not funny problems. Real problems.

While I need to preserve the usual fourth-wall-related ambiguity, there’s someone in my life who I’m appallingly worried about. They’re in a very bad state, drinking far too much and eating next to nothing.

And I’ve heard them saying things that imply a deepening and genuinely disturbing sense of paranoia.

This person won’t listen to any advice, however sugar-coated and tactfully phrased, doesn’t have many other people in their life who’d notice or care, and seems hell-bent on a deepening spiral of self-destruction.

Yet while something is very obviously not right, there’s not enough obviously wrong to bring Social Services into the equation. Anyway, their entry would be about as welcome as a Smirnoff Ice promotions stand at an AA meeting - and if I did sic them on this person and they found out I’d done it, they’d immediately cut off contact with me completely.

To say they regard social workery and mental healthy types with suspicion is a very serious understatement, and I can’t necessarily say I blame them (although by and large, I tend to regard the munchkins in question as more sinned against than sinning. And doing a thankless job you couldn’t get me to do if you stuck an extra nought on the salary – more Jo Brand in Getting On than Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. )

Anyway, so I’m trying to ignore a huge sick feeling of impending doom regarding this person. And meanwhile, like a lazy director, fate has arranged for these all-enveloping worries to coincide with the slow bleak descent into winter.

I don’t normally write about this sort of thing, and you can probably see why not - because it’s unfunny and uninteresting and depressing. And I obviously have to leave out all the specific -personal-details stuff that could potentially bring it to life and make it readable in a Child-Called-It sort of way.

However, it’s also occupying about ninety per cent of my non-work-related mind - and I can’t, with any degree of conviction, act like I particularly care about my usual subject matter. Every other subject that occurs to me lately - jealousy in relationships and why I don’t have it, the perils of online dating, the pros and cons of older versus younger men - comes closely followed by a weary, preoccupied and irritable sense of ‘oh whatever whatever WHATEVER. Who gives a shit.‘

So just to let you know, I’m still here. I’m just bogged down by other concerns, which remain resolutely bleak, grim and unbloggable – less Candace Bushnell than Hubert Selby Jr.

I’ll probably be back soon.

Incidentally - and if you’re not interested in movies, stop reading now – I recently re-watched one of the greatest films of all time – Mulholland Drive. I’m completely baffled as to why people say it’s so confusing. I usually have the exact opposite experience with films – from the Departed to The Godfather to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I’m always the special needs child trying to figure out who he is and who she is and who they’re going to meet and why he shot that girl in the club and why that other man left that suitcase under a tree. And don’t ask me what on earth was happening in No Country For Old Men, because I haven’t got a damned clue.

But the story of Mulholland Drive is really, really, really simple – I think, anyway. Here’s my take on it. The last third of the film is reality. A failed, drug-addicted and suicidally depressed actress played by Naomi Watts has been cast aside by her adored and far more successful gay lover, played by Laura Elena Haring – who’s got bored of her clingy neediness, and has fallen for a high-powered director instead.

Haring behaves towards Watts with awesome cruelty - but at the risk of going all film-school-wanky, there’s a good chance we’re seeing her actions through the prism of Watts’ own spiraling paranoia, and what she perceives as deliberate sadism is actually just careless indifference and couldn’t-give-a-shit.

As a result, Watts’ bitterness and betrayal escalate to the point where she hires a hit-man to kill Haring – meeting him in a secretive diner, handing over the money, and showing him a photograph with the words ‘this is the girl.’

The first two-thirds of the movie is Watts’ drugged fever-dream as she goes to sleep after setting this in motion. On one level, it’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy, where the hated/loved, unattainable Haring becomes a helpless and dependent amnesiac, who hides out in Watts’ apartment and falls in love with her. And where, far from being a washed-up junkie, Watts is a pretty, sweetly naive young ingénue on the brink of being recognized as a great actress.

Yet underneath the fevered fantasy, there are strong undercurrents of Watts’ incoherent paranoia at how the Hollywood dream machine really works. Through weird sequences of behind-the-scenes skullduggery and intimidation, we’re shown that a director who really wants to cast Watts in a star-making role is inexplicably strong-armed into choosing another girl (in real life, she lost the crucial part to Haring.)

In addition to the malign shadowy forces which are busily at work screwing Watts’ Hollywood dream up, there’s an overwhelming sense of menace emanating from a highly specific location – the same sad, decaying bungalow that she inhabits, and is sleeping in, in real life.

The diner where she met the hit man recurs as a scene of nightmare and nameless menace, as does the unexplained wad of money – really, the hit-man’s payment, which is weighing heavily on Watts’ unconscious mind. All connected by a surreal dream-logic, real-life characters appearing in random bit-parts, and the recurrence of a fatal phrase from reality – ‘this is the girl.’

Of course, the first two-thirds of the movie also has bizarre, random things like evil cowboys and sinister dwarves and horrible hairy monster-tramps hiding behind skips. But it’s a damn dream, so what do you expect?

(If you’re not interested in movies or David Lynch, I really hope you skipped the last God knows how many paragraphs, or it would have bored the tits off you. Hopefully I’ll be able to think of something funnier soon. Mad love.)

J x

Hell Is The Brothers

2010-09-28T14:07:00.002+01:00

I do love the way that our new Leader of the Opposition’s been portrayed as the cooler Miliband brother - the more attractive, laid-back, charismatic, fundamentally human one.

Is it just me who thinks it’s decidedly unfair that all these judgments are being made in comparison to David Miliband?

It’s like some sort of optical illusion where you stand an elephant next to a whale, and the elephant looks tiny.

I mean, practically anything on the face of this planet is going to look attractive, laid-back, charismatic and human if you stand it next to David Miliband.

Can you imagine how pissed off you’d be if you were, say, Stephen Baldwin?

‘Jesus Christ. If only I’d had David Miliband as a brother, I’d be feted from here to eternity as the handsome, witty, charming, eligible one.

‘My fucking luck to get stuck with fucking Alex. ‘

Okay, so Ed’s less of a wonky weirdo than his big brother, but that’s not saying an awful lot. My suspicion is – the second Mr Ed stands next to David Cameron - we’re all going to see what extraordinarily lavish PR favours the David-Miliband-comparison was doing him before.

God knows, I don’t like David Cameron one little bit - but in all fairness, he looks significantly less like someone who might file his socks according to manufacturer and date of purchase, and have a lifelong phobia of the number 7. And who might have exactly the same dinner arranged in exactly the same formation every evening - three potatoes in one corner, skinless chicken breast in the other corner, and a circle of ketchup in the dead centre of the plate.

And who might, if the ketchup touches the potatoes or the chicken breast, go and sit in the corner rocking back and forth for several hours, making an eerie low-pitched moaning noise.

Call it autistic temperament.

If David storms off in a huff, Ed will have to find equally flattering-by-comparison types to hang out with in order to make him look normal and non-creepy again.

The only names that immediately spring to mind are Mr Bean, Uri Geller and the guy with a beard off The Hangover.

The Miliband brothers missed a serious trick, anyway. They could have gone up for the vote together as a single package - like those other famous brothers with the annoying mannerisms and the funny hair.

And marketed themselves as Dedward.

J x

PS - By the way, and I know I’m way behind the curve on this one, I don’t know if you’ve seen the film Collateral. I avoided it like the plague when it came out. I got up to the bit in reviews where it said ‘Tom Cruise plays an ice-cold deadly hit man.’ Then I immediately rolled my eyes, thought ‘bitch, please - what’s he going to do, bite his victims’ ankles?’ and skipped to the next review. I’m not a Cruise fan, to put it mildly. As far as I’m concerned, if he entered the Loathsome Overrated Rodent-Faced Midget Of The Year award, his only serious competition would come from Bono.

So I immediately put Collateral up there with the Sex and the City movie and PS, I Love You on my list of ‘films I will only ever watch if I am lying catatonic in a hospital bed and the TV screen happens to be playing it in my line of vision and I can’t turn my head and there isn’t a nurse around to move me.’

But sheer boredom made me watch Collateral on TV over the weekend, and it’s quite mind-boggling how wrong I was. A genuine five-star movie. Best thing I’ve seen in God knows how long. Also - I simply can’t believe I’m about to write the following sentence, but here goes nothing - Tom Cruise is awe-inspiringly sexy in this film. I mean, his hit-man Vincent has got to be one of the ten hottest male characters I’ve ever seen in any film, ever. And it’s not even like he does anything remotely sexual at any point in the festivities. Maybe there’ll be a sequel one day that gives him a love interest. I can dream.

A La Recherche Du Tennis Perdu

2010-09-27T13:16:00.004+01:00

For Proust, it was a madeline*.

For me, it was this article by Charlie Brooker.

It’s funny, the little things that bring decades-old memories back to three-dimensional life.

Now, I laughed like hell at the article. But it sounds like Charlie Brooker had it one Christ of a lot easier than me when it came to sports at school.

Believe me, from my teenage point of view, the difference between ‘picked fourth from last’ and ‘picked last’ was all the difference in the world.

Between my erstwhile sports-self and Charlie Brooker’s erstwhile sports-self, there’s the same gulf as you get between a part-time employee in a call centre and someone living in a cardboard box.

They may look more or less the same to the Roman Abramovitches of this world - but when you’re down there at the sharp end, these subtle gradations of loserdom matter.

(Anyway, much as I love Charlie Brooker usually, he’s gone and completely wrecked his cynical-outsider credibility for me by getting engaged to Konnie Huq. I mean, I’ve got nothing against the girl, but it’s just all wrong. It’s like if Bill Hicks had hooked up with Fearne Cotton. And quite a bit like when Innocent Smoothies got partially bought by Coke.

Okay, I still drink Innocent smoothies, but not with quite the same gusto - and the previously-charmingly-whimsical label copy now strikes me as fake and cynical as all hell. And those quirky little knitted bobble hat things they put on the caps sometimes get on my goddamn nerves. You’re not fooling anyone with the loveable-hippy schtick, Innocent. We know you’re a big greedy corporate bastard whose CEO drives an Aston Martin and shags Russian pros. If your drinks didn’t taste so nice, you could fuck right off.)

But getting back to the sports-at-school thing. I was just reading Charlie Brooker’s article, when I suddenly remembered one of the single most terrifying memories of my life. A story that vividly illustrates the gulf between ‘quite crap at sports’ and ‘worst in the year.’

It was tennis at school. A glorious summer afternoon. I was thirteen years old. There were five of us on one court knocking about, the overall standard pretty hopeless, but nonetheless enjoyable. It was as close to happiness and relaxation as I’d ever got in a games class, which in retrospect should have warned me that something was about to go horribly wrong. The four other girls on the court were good friends of mine. They were all in the bottom fifth of the school socially, in the top fifth of the school academically, and - consequently – were genuinely nice girls.

(The inverse correlation between your popularity and your grades is generally a good way to tell how nice or evil you are at school. There may be exceptions, but I never met one.)

None of these girls were as atrocious at games as me, but none were particularly good either – we were pretty much a line-up of the last five girls to be picked, with me being last among equals.

Suddenly, heavy footsteps echoed through the courts, and a dark hulking shadow blocked out the sunlight. A creature of indeterminate gender towered before us. You only get women with jaws like that and eyes like that in two professions - and as they weren’t hiring for concentration camp guards any more, she’d had to become a games teacher.

And she was bitter about it. You could tell. When she’d watched Schindler’s List, she’d felt like one of those old 60s footballers who’d spent his World-Cup winning heyday living in a rented semi with a Nora Batty lookalike, now an old man watching a documentary about Cristiano Ronaldo. But for a tragic accident of timing, that could have been her. The lifestyle. The glamour. The gun.

‘There’s five of you on here. There should be four on each court. Juliette, go over to that court instead.’

With a horrible sinking feeling, I looked over to the court she was pointing to.

Where the three most popular, sporty and vicious girls in the year were knocking up to a standard that would have rivaled Centre Court at Wimbledon.

She could have been ordering me over the top in WW1. Into a lion’s den. Into a gladiatorial arena.

No, actually this was much worse than the prospect of walking into a gladiatorial arena. If the worst I had to worry about was some big iron-helmeted fucker with a spiky ball on a chain he was swinging round his head, I’d have been in there like a rat up a drainpipe.

This was serious.

‘Juliette, didn’t you hear me? Go over to that one. ‘

Deliberate sadism? No, hindsight tells me that’s paranoia deluxe. This woman would have needed an extra twenty IQ points to even get her head round the concept. What we’re dealing with here is just a stupefying lack of imagination and thought. A mind-boggling unawareness that there was a possibility my arrival would not be greeted well by the social elite of the year - a trio of young ladies who made Naomi Campbell, Paris Hilton and Katie Price look like a cosy gathering of Avon ladies.

This is what the lifelong-good-at-sports types don’t get, when they’re trying to get the shy loser kids to be healthy and do more exercise. It’s not that the shy loser kids are lazy or unmotivated or deficient in moral fibre. It’s just that they don’t fancy the idea of being torn to fucking pieces by the most terrifying people they know.

I’d like to say that I’m writing this story with a wry smile of recollection. And in fact, I actually am - if you replace the word ‘wry’ with the word ‘cold,’ and the word ‘smile’ with the word ‘sweat’.

The sports teacher was still watching me with her burly arms folded. Shit. I was going to have to go over there. But I couldn’t. My legs wouldn’t move, and my stomach felt like the inside of a freezer. I gazed over to the other court with the expression and demeanour of a rabbit in headlights. The picture wasn’t getting any more reassuring. Terrifyingly high standard of tennis. Shrieking laughter that managed to sound blood-curdlingly vicious and intimidating even when it was just them and they didn’t have anyone to pick on.

Jesus H Christ, I’d be about as welcome on that court as Morgan Freeman at an annual general meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. It would be a miracle to rival the loaves and the fishes if I survived to eat supper.

I looked back at the other four nice girls for a second that lasted for an hour. We who are about to die salute you.

Then Lottie stepped forward. Lottie was more in the Charlie Brooker position on the sports hierarchy, being the best at sports of all of us. Lottie was a tall quiet studious girl with straight blonde hair and a very neat pencil tin and a love of ponies. Her total absence of things like thick glasses, strange hair, BO, spots, dandruff or second-hand clothes also meant that she had the highest social status and popularity of all of us. Which meant that the cool kids usually spoke to her without an attached epithet, and someone from the hockey A-team once lent her a ruler.

‘Don’t worry, Juliette,’ she said calmly. ’I’ll go.’

And she walked off to the cool girls’ court, in the certain communal knowledge that she’d be slightly nibbled - but not receive anywhere near the absolute life-threatening savaging I’d get in her place.

To this very day, it remains the most fundamentally, purely and breathtakingly selfless thing I have ever seen anyone do in my entire life.

And one of the very few memories that call into doubt my deep cynicism, and my belief that human nature is fundamentally dark, cold and brutal.

It was downright Christlike.

If you’re reading this, Lottie, I owe you one.

Yet the final word on this story can only come from a Rab C Nesbitt episode back in the day.

‘Ah, schooldays. Happiest days of your life.

‘Happiest days of your life if you’re a sado-masochist.’

J x

*So much cooler and more literary-masterpiece-friendly than a Hob Nob. Say what you like about the French, but they piss all over us when it comes to style.

Drink, Steal, Fuck

2010-09-24T17:16:00.001+01:00

I’ve just had this great idea for an inspirational self-help-travelogue classic.

It’s called ‘Drink, Steal, Fuck.’

When an unhappy middle-class journalist realises her marriage is over and that her conventional life is unfulfilling, she decides it’s time to get in touch with the real her. It’s the beginning of a journey of inspirational self-discovery that will take her to exotic locations across the world.

Her first stop is colourful, vibrant, earthy Scunthorpe, where she discovers the hedonistic delights of the perfectly blended super strength white cider – and rapidly loses her uptight Western guilt at self-indulgence, along with her former obsession with weight, health and bladder control. Under the patient tutelage of charming local suitor Mad Frank, she loses herself to the simple joys of super strength own brand lager and miniature bottles of Teacher’s from the corner shop. One magical morning, she watches the sun rising while drinking White Ace on a park bench.

She then travels to the mist-shrouded pinnacles of inscrutable Birmingham, where she discovers the arcane arts of shoplifting and car theft – ancient and mystical knowledge shrouded in mystery and romance, handed down the ages from parent to child. Amazed and humbled by the wisdom she encounters, she embarks on a pilgrimage to visit the legendary shoplifter Kelly Marie Scroggins. Upon encountering the mysterious and all-knowing Kelly Marie, she is astounded that such ancient mystical arts continue to thrive unseen in the modern world. Who, in today’s anaemic and blinkered western society, could have dreamed there were so many ways of removing a security tag?

Following this life-changing experience, her travels take her to the crowded, dusty, life-affirming byways of magical Swindon - where she shags the handsome and exotic Kevin in the toilets of Da Vinci’s nightclub.

I’ve got something here, I tell you.

Any publishers want to pay me to get out there and do this stuff for real, you know where I am.

J x

(By the way, mental illness has a new name, and that name is apparently Nina Power. If you find yourself wanting to shag your supper or eat your wife, I’d suggest that your lack of commitment to the feminist cause wasn’t your most pressing problem.)

Subject Matter

2010-09-22T13:18:00.001+01:00

I’m in something of a quandary writing-wise.

Whatever I write, I end up having someone saying I should focus on something else.

But the trouble is, I’ve already wandered down any number of avenues - and found huge, glaring problems lurking down each one.

The raw, personal, harrowing, emotional stuff? Ridiculously traumatic to write. About half as much fun as a week in the dentist’s chair. And when you add in the presence of trolls, insult joins injury in a superheroic alliance reminiscent of Batman and Robin.

It’s a bit like pouring your heart out about your darkest memories on a psychiatrists couch, only to look up and find a complete stranger giving you a slow handclap and calling you a pathetic bitch.

Only in cyberspace, you don’t have the option of jumping up and smashing the hateful little cunt’s teeth down the back of his throat.

Which is a bit of a shame.

So that sort of thing gets pretty old pretty quickly.

Politics? To me, politics is a bit like Tatler magazine. It’s quite entertaining to dip into every now and again, in a masochistic kind of way - but whenever I study it for any length of time, I can physically feel my will to live draining out of my body. It would be one thing if I was getting paid for this stuff, and I dare say I could overlook my essential lack of interest in the same way as I can overlook my essential dislike of management meetings.

But when I’m doing it for free, forget it. I mean, who gives a rat’s toss if the new Labour leader’s going to be bug-eyed Bollocks or one of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers? Or Diane Abbot, or Bobby Davro, or Susan Boyle? Or the mad old Scottish tramp who sits outside my local newsagent muttering about conspiracies (although having said that, I think he may have been the last incumbent.)

And you couldn’t pay me enough to read Tony Blair’s autobiography. Well, you could, but let’s get real here – you’re not going to, and I’m sure as fuck not reading it for free. Even if I found a copy on the train, I don’t think I could bear to open the bloody thing. Anyway, from the author’s usual track record, I’d bet some serious money that it bears about as much resemblance to reality as Harry fucking Potter.

Current affairs? See politics, times ten. I couldn’t give a flying fox about road tax or the Pope’s visit or the Roma’s problems in France (although I do think it’s quite funny how fictional gypsies, as in Chocolat and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, tend to get regarded with suspicion on account of being colourful, unconventional, freedom-loving charmers. Whereas real gypsies tend to get regarded with suspicion on account of being fucking horrible and stealing people’s wallets.)

Men and dating and the battle of the sexes? I just get a load of tiresome aggro when I share my genuine, unvarnished thoughts on all this stuff, and not even the good kind of aggro. I’m not talking the kind of thing where you get four hundred hysterical responses - half of whom think you’re the second coming, the other half think you’re the devil incarnate - and national magazines know your name. I’m talking the kind of thing where you get exactly two responses. One saying you’re a gold digging bitch and none of your boyfriends wanted you anyway and they bet you’re ugly in real life. And the other one saying you’re a desperate bunny-boiling prostitute.

And ruining an already shitty Monday morning with a burning desire to find the people in question and smash their faces repeatedly into your keyboard.

(I’m not normally violent, I hasten to add. I’ve never been in a fight in my life. It’s just that writing this bloody thing brings out all the worst in me.)

Movies? Trouble is, it’s entirely random what I watch in any given week. My Lovefilm list tends to consist of the most arcane movies you’ve never heard of (Suspiria? Gaslight? Titus? Thought not.) And otherwise, it’s just whatever old late-night B-movie shite I happen to catch on telly when I get in (Jeepers Creepers 2? The Devil’s Rejects? 1,000 Maniacs? Thought not either.)

I’ve been advised to go and see the big new releases that everyone’s heard of, then review them on here. However, I then hit much the same problem as I’ve already referred to with politics – namely, I’m not being paid for this shit, and most of the big new releases which everyone’s heard of blatantly suck. And I’ll be skullfucked by leprechauns if I’m paying fifteen quid of my own hard-earned money to sit through two and a half hours of The Last fucking Airbender.

Anyway, this is all a ridiculously long-winded way to lead up to me saying, you’ll get what you’re bloody well given on here. And if that’s completely random musings on subjects you couldn’t care less about once every two weeks, too fucking bad.

And I mean that in the nicest possible way.

But please don’t stop reading me. I love you lots.

Especially if you leave nice comments.

J x

Free Willies 2 : The Triumph Of The Willies

2010-09-21T12:29:00.001+01:00

Okay, a quick sequel to my last post.

Lest you rolled your eyes when you read it, and thought I was ignorant and sexually sheltered and shockable beyond belief - I know damn well that the creepy stories in question were not that technically extreme.

Of course, I’ve heard of way more extreme and theoretically frightening things. Not to boast or anything, but I’m pretty much au fait with every perversion in the book, from Asphyxiation to Zoophilia. Pregnant midgets hold no terrors for me. Or pissing Japanese schoolgirls, or Roman showers. Or even coprophilia or bestiality, so long as nobody expects me to do this stuff myself, in which case they can go and fuck themselves. Some things are just plain damn wrong.

I’ve seen Amsterdam sex shop shelves where the guy on a DVD cover looked like he was eating a bit of raw meat, and – upon conference with my ex – we decided it really was a used tampon. And I was happily tucking into a cheeseburger five minutes later.

My ex-boyfriend could not match this feat.

This is why I think I’m pretty much unshockable.

I’ve seen just about every notoriously disturbing film you can shake a stick at. Pasolini’s Salo (which was shit). Straw Dogs (which was also shit). Peter Greenaway’s Baby of Macon (shit). Antichrist (pretentious and shit). The Night Porter (load of old bollocks, and apparently made on a budget of five pounds fifty). The Wicker Man. Cannibal Holocaust. Scum. Witchfinder General. Any one of these films, I could have watched before bedtime and been fast asleep five minutes after turning in for the night.

I was just about first in the queue to see The Human Centipede, and the only part of it that remotely disturbed me was the part where I realized I’d spent twelve quid to see the pointless piece of crap.

Book-wise, I’d sought out the Marquis de Sade before I hit the age of consent (the single greatest cultural disappointment I would ever experience in my life – at least till Chinese Democracy came along to seize the crown over a decade later). Not to mention Last Exit to Brooklyn, Irvine Welsh’s Filth, the collected works of Thomas Harris, Stephen King and Mo Hayder, Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden, the list goes on.

When it comes to Sick Lit, I could write a thesis.

Most recently, I devoured Marlon James’ (brilliant) novel The Book of Night Women. Which, if you’re interested, features such factual 18th century Jamaican slave-plantation diversions as burning attempted escapees alive over slow three-day-long fires, “Derby’s dose,” (Google search if you’re curious, but not right after lunch), vaginal and anal rape with red hot pokers, crucifixion on spike-studded gibbets, and that’s just a bit of light entertainment before the massa’s breakfast.

Again, I never lost a wink of sleep over any of this stuff. And it was my book at bedtime for about a week and a half.

Yet I found a random amateur author’s far smaller-scale fictional cruelties infinitely easier to relate to, and to imagine happening in real life - and therefore, infinitely more disturbing.

It’s very much the same reason why I cried about a thousand times more at the bit where the old guy hangs himself in The Shawshank Redemption than I did in the entire three-or-four-hour running time of Schindler’s List (where to be frank, I had a seriously hard time squeezing out a single tear. It was the sort of thing where you have to pretend to sniffle a bit, or people think you’re cold and horrible. Not blinking for a while helps).

Why? Surely the small despair of one lonely old ex-con is far less tragic than the spectacular wholesale genocide of millions of innocent men, woman and children?

But to me, the very fact of its small, mundane scale meant that I found it way way way way easier to identify with and be moved by.

Being herded into a gas chamber with thousands of naked, terrified strangers? Fact is, I simply can’t imagine what that’s like. It’s not that I’m hard-hearted or evil. Or even unimaginative. I’m imaginative to a fault, where things are rooted in a world I understand and recognize. I just can’t put the Holocaust, or bloodthirsty slave-owners, or elaborate Sadeian orgies of mutilation and murder, into any sort of context with my own life and my own knowledge of the world. As nothing I’ve ever seen or experienced in my fairly ordinary English existence has given me the slightest glimpse of anything remotely like it.

But imagining a lost old man shuffling along a busy street, in an alien modern world he doesn’t recognize or feel a part of any more - that shit felt real to me. I could imagine it happening on my local high street. Shit, I’m close to crying again even thinking about that scene in the Shawshank Redemption. It was fucking heartbreaking.

Equally, I can read about kidnapped nine-year-old sex slaves to boy soldiers in Africa having the tendons in their feet slashed so they can’t run away, and women raped by bayonets, and God only knows what nightmarish Third World horrors - and these stories won’t even lodge in my mind. At some crucial emotional level, I’ve forgotten all about them ten minutes later. Try as I might, I just can’t relate.

Tell me about an outwardly normal, intelligent and pleasant but secretly twisted man deliberately destroying his other half’s self-confidence, happiness and peace of mind for his own sick kicks, however - and I have a case of the cold creeps that just won’t go away and leave me alone.

Because I can see this shit in my mind’s eye far, far, far too clearly.

Ironically, it was the very plausible, small-scale, could-be-happening-right-next-door-to-you nature of these stories that gave me the willies deluxe. Far more than any Gotterdammurung of mass bloodshed ever could do.

Thought I’d clear that up for you, anyway. Just in case you thought I was turning into some sort of pussy.

I’m rock ‘ard, I tell you.

Grrr.

J x

Free Willies

2010-09-20T12:50:00.004+01:00

For the last couple of years – hell, let’s say six or seven years – I’d started to think I’d become emotionally desensitized to the point of virtual autism. In all this time, I can count the number of news stories, films, books, blog posts etc that have genuinely shocked, disturbed or haunted me on the fingers of one hand.

Otherwise, my skin’s gone like a rhino’s. The most horrifying stories – child soldiers, Baby P, Josef Fritzl, Roissy in DC - have left me, at some deep crucial level, unshaken and unstirred. My morbid fascination and hyper-susceptibility to the willies - a once lively and active presence in my life – had grown fat and middle-aged and torpid. It sat there slumped in an armchair and staring at the telly with dull piggy eyes.

Well, this weekend, something woke it up in grand style.

Okay, the background. I lurk on the Informed Consent site sometimes, and even posted a few blogs of my own there back when I wrote more about sex. I think I may have found a few of my favourite readers that way. My morbid fascination occasionally stirs to life when I’m lurking on that site – I remember one man who admitted to wanking over the desperate faces of Romanian female beggars outside his local tube station (not literally, thank God - that would lend a whole new terror to destitution.) But ultimately, the old morbid fascination was just shifting and yawning before changing the channel to Last of the Summer Wine. And it remained fundamentally un-bothered.

Until this weekend. When something woke it up in grand style.

Without further introduction, Constant Reader, here is the single creepiest thing I have read in several years. Best not visit this site at work, by the way. Wait till you get home. And remember, you can't un-read this stuff.

Now, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Seriously, is it just me getting the major-league willies here?

I mean, massive willies. Errol-Flynn-sized willies. A whole Chippendales strip-club line up of the things.

But the story’s getting all these comments saying it’s hot.

There aren’t enough question-marks in the world sometimes, are there?

Hey, I’m not judgmental. Consenting adults, free country, all that malarkey. And it’s just one guy’s writing, and probably a fantasy at that. Yet this is what I’m consciously telling myself, like whistling past a graveyard. The fact is, this incongruously well-written little story’s left me intensely and lingeringly uneasy for two solid days – unnerving me at that visceral, haunting level that so very few things have been able to achieve. And it’s also confused the living shit out of me.

Is this a well-known fetish I’ve never heard of? Am I being naive? Are there plenty of women out there who’ll find this story hot, as opposed to horrifying? Is there something I’m not getting here?

So I then searched through the guy’s archives, in search of more clues as to whether I was over-reacting or not. My morbid fascination was leaping out of that armchair and moving faster than it had done in ten years.

And lo and behold, I found something else by the same author that creeped me out even more. Which, a mere five minutes ago, I’d have thought was full-on impossible.

Go on, have some more willies. You know you want to.

And if you’re up for a third helping – you masochistic motherfucker - you’ll find it here.

I’m not quite sure if I want to thank this Ash fellow for dragging my morbid fascination out of lazy retirement and back to fighting-fit life like Mr Incredible.

Or if I want to sue the sick fuck for creating the horrible little creepy things that are now edging furtively through the dark alleys at the back of my mind - and giving my nightmares a whole new name.

(Incidentally, to anyone who’s accused me of being a fucked-up sicko in the past - you owe me one hell of an apology. Hold me up next to these people and I look like Sandy from fucking Grease.)

*Ladies, have you ever been turned on by the idea of being called fat, ugly, pathetic and embarrassing? Or being openly cheated on with someone hotter? Or being systematically psychologically destroyed by the man in your life? If so, our production team would like to speak to you. You sick, strange, scary fuck. Call us*

J x

The Unspeakable Truth

2010-09-14T13:22:00.002+01:00

Oh, how dearly I would love to let you know what’s been going on in my life lately.

You have no idea how much I want to hit some of my critics with these events. If only I could somehow prove their veracity, it would leave my trolls, naysayers and haters open-mouthed and speechless. It would be fucking joyous.

It would be like the bit in a movie where there’s the last two people in a high-stakes poker game - smoky room, palpable tension, vast pile of cash and chips on the table – and finally, one guy slams down his cards, and they’re nothing special. And there’s a long, long breathless pause before the other guy slowly overturns a royal flush.

Take that and party, motherfuckers.

Except I can’t bloody mention it. Not any of it. It’s too specific and too immediately-recognizable-to-anyone-who-knows-me.

Cautious discretion is a whole lot less fun than it’s cracked up to be.

Let’s just say that I’m happy, and nice things have been happening to me.

There, that’s general and opaque enough – if deeply unsatisfying and frustrating for yours truly. That fourth wall is staying rock solid.

Anyway, I just thought I’d clear something up, as I’ve been asked it a few times now.

Why, if I dislike men so much, do I constantly obsess over them?

Well for a start, I don’t constantly obsess over them. At least, I don’t obsess over them anywhere apart from on here.

The proportion of my writing that’s devoted to men and sex and dating – and the proportion of my actual life that’s devoted to same – are wildly and diametrically opposed to one another.

This is because, stating the bloody obvious yet again, a vast chunk of my life is well and truly off-limits. Cordoned off from this blog by discreet little red velvet ropes, which are manned by burly security guards in white shirts and black jackets and bow ties – politely but unambiguously stopping any stray readers who try to wander off into the private section.

I point blank can’t write anything whatsoever about work, or anything professional or career-aspirationish. This is a huge set-in-stone no-no. If I was up for a long-awaited promotion or retraining to go into a totally different field, you would know cock all about it, even though it would be occupying approximately 85% of my waking thoughts.

Furthermore, I’m extremely uncomfortable writing in any detail whatsoever about friends or family. At least, at any level of depth or detail where you could get any idea of their character or recognize them from real life. Which means I can’t share anything interesting or engaging about them, or bring them to three-dimensional life in any way. All I can share with you is randomly selected names scrawled on flimsy, shapeless cardboard cut-outs, a bit like a Bret Easton Ellis novel (okay, ten quid for anyone out there who can tell me one single defining characteristic of McDermott in American Psycho. Even Jackie Collins has the decency to give her characters long shiny black hair or a fiery temper.)

Living arrangements and the general minutiae of my life – ditto. If I was buying a flat, or struggling with the mortgage, or moving to a brand new city, I wouldn’t tell you. This stuff’s personal. Fourth wall again.

My specific hobbies and passions are also unshareable. To give an example, if I was (and I’m not saying I am) e.g. a passionate diver in my spare time, I couldn’t possibly tell you about this, as diving is a highly specific hobby and would be way too instantly recognizable to anyone who knew me in real life. Or if I liked painting. Or belonged to an orchestra. Or wanted to open a small business making novelty cupcakes.

Ergo, though a simple process of elimination – the subject of men, dating, sex etc is the only possible outlet for my extra curricular creative energies, along with more generic, could-be-written-by-anyone-female interests such as gym and haircare and diets and random musings on la comedie humaine. With occasional whimsical little forays into recent films I’ve seen and why I think George Osborne is a cock.

Which means I’m training my creative microscope on a very, very small and specific surface area. Which inevitably leads to microanalysing tiny nuances and quirks of the dating game and sexual politics. Overanalysing, some may say. Jane Austen had much the same problem :-)

But for every single thing you think you know about me, there are eighty more things you don’t.

Ergo, I’d be much obliged if readers could wind it in with the personal attacks, which have pissed me off on this otherwise fine and happy morning. I'm starting to think of it as Twat Tuesday.

As my wise old granny once told me in my youth, ‘if you can’t say anything nice, go fuck yourself up the arse with a pineapple.’

I think there’s a message there for all of us, don’t you?

J x

I Aten't Dead

2010-09-13T13:38:00.003+01:00

Just to warn you upfront, there’s absolutely no coherent thread linking this post together. It’s just a load of irrelevant random stuff to keep you updated and remind you I’m not dead.

Funny how it’s so much easier to write when there’s sod all to write about. It’s all been a bit hectic round here, with two second dates, a third date and a looming first date with someone who sounds very interesting indeed, but will probably be the biggest disappointment since Chinese Democracy. One of the date men is stunning, and quite ridiculously out of my league. I can’t quite figure out why I’m not more intimidated or dizzy or rabbit-in-headlights-ish about him, or why I’m not obsessively checking my phone every three minutes to see if he’s texted me again. The bit of me that gets intimidated and overawed and blurts out stupid things round uber-hot men seems to have died quietly and unnoticed at some point during the last year. Good riddance. It was shit.

Rather happily, every date I’ve been on this time round has led to a call-back and a request for another. Some people would rather be dumped after a first date than after a second or third, but I’d say the exact opposite. Lose a guy two or three dates in, and it could mean absolutely anything – maybe he doesn’t date girls from your religion and only just found out what it was, or maybe he doesn’t like your taste in music, or maybe he decided he couldn’t face a serious relationship with someone who prefers James Patterson to Martin Amis. Lose a guy one date in – assuming you didn’t get blind drunk or dance on the table or snog the waiter - and the only possible explanation is that he thought you were a munter.

So my batting average is definitely going up, in direct defiance of popular wisdom. Perhaps this is because maturity is lending me a charm and self-possession I didn’t have before. Or perhaps it is because - again in defiance of the popular wisdom that says it’s all downhill physically from 25 if you’re a woman – I’m a good half stone thinner than last time I was online dating, with a much smaller waist courtesy of Zumba and much better hair courtesy of the Brazilian Blow Dry. The jury’s out (but only to get a quick coffee, and they’ll be back in three minutes with a very predictable verdict.)

Sorry, but men really are that fucking shallow. This is experience talking, and plenty of it. If you are one of those men who are even now preparing to write in furiously and tell me I’m wrong – be still, your beating keyboard. You are the outliers. You are the human equivalent of cats who love swimming. I’m aware that you exist, but – and this is very, very important indeed - your existence is not the norm.

Here’s my little online experiment for those who claim I’m wrong about this and men en masse aren’t as mind-meltingly shallow as I think.

What you will need.

Free trial membership dating site
Computer access

Go into Google image. Find an image of a plain mumsy middle-aged woman of a certain size. Something like this.

Now, spend hours shaping a carefully-considered witty, charming, delightful profile to accompany this picture. A profile that sparkles with warmth, likeability and charm, subtle intelligence and character, optimism, balance and wisdom.

Now, go into Google Image, and search for a random Playboy model image - nobody famous enough to be recognizable or airbrushed enough to be obviously fake.

Something like this.

Now, attached to this image, write a profile claiming to be an obsessive Barry Manilow fan, line dancer and devout Jehovah’s Witness who loves Jim Davidson, My Little Pony and collecting empty canisters of Zyklon B.

Now, post both of these profiles online.

If the latter profile doesn’t get more replies within the first minute of being posted than the former profile receives in six full months, I’ll buy you a bottle of Cristal to say I was wrong.

Hell, two bottles of Cristal and a fuck-off jar of Beluga caviar.

And a small Greek island made of 24-carat gold.

Then again, internet dating photos are something of a minefield at the best of times. Clearly, it’s not a good idea to post an unflattering picture. But what about a picture that’s too flattering? A rare, happy accident of the perfect lighting and the perfect angle that does you more favours than a crooked MP with a brown envelope of fifty pound notes stuffed in his pocket?

Nobody wants to be the human version of the Big Mac. You know, where the picture on the box promises a visual treat - extravagant frill of bright-green lettuce, thick red wedge of shiny tomato, meticulously arranged sunshine-yellow cheese slice - all impeccably laid out inside a bun as big, tanned, round and perky as a centrefold’s tit.

When what’s lurking forlornly inside the box is a dishevelled little greyish thing which is moulting shreds of limp mayo-clogged greenery, and which looks like Chris Moyles has been sitting on it for the last three hours.

Oh and on the subject of Chris Moyles – I’ve just been reading about his relationship breakup. It’s been something of a breath of fresh air after all the Poor Coleen Rooney bollocks, a tale of woe which I’d like to accompany with my musical magnum opus - a tragic symphony entitled My Heart Pumps Purple Piss For You and played on the world’s smallest violin.

IMHO, Colleen Rooney can fuck off and stop moaning.* Whereas here’s Sophie Waite, a genuinely hard-done-by woman who my heart genuinely goes out to.

I mean, Jesus Christ. Poor cow.

I really can’t imagine any more insults being added to any more injuries here.

Proof, were even more proof needed, that the stereotype of hot-but-unreliable-alpha male and slobby-but-dependable beta is the biggest myth since Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and the railway station vending machine that doesn’t take a violent dislike to one of your pound coins and keep spitting it out as fast as you can reinsert it.

I have said it before and I will say it again. Handsome, stylish, charming, desirable men with limitless sexual options do not have any sort of monopoly on being arseholes, liars, cheats and all-round scumbags.

This is a pernicious fiction spread about by pig-ugly wankers with the tits of Ann Widdecombe, the clothes of Jim Royle, the personal habits of John McCririck and the muscle tone of a pork scratching. And this fiction is cynically intended to lure in foolish women who’ve recently been bruised by Mr Hot. To make them think ‘well, he’ll be different. I mean, sure, I’ll have to keep my eyes closed in bed and only ever do it with the lights out. And keep my fingers crossed that I don’t run into anyone I know when we’re out shopping together. But at least he’ll be grateful and faithful and won’t leave me for someone else.’

I would bet some serious money that these self-same words are ringing in the ears of Chris Moyles’ disproportionately thin and foxy blonde ex night after night after night - as she comes to terms with the stark fact that she’s just been spectacularly mugged off by Jabba the Hutt’s uglier, slobbier and more quintessentially repulsive kid brother.

At least being dumped by the George Clooneys of this world isn’t quite so fucking humiliating.

J x

*I really, really don’t get it with a guy cheating and what’s so terrible about it. I just can’t see for the life of me why it matters. So long as three crucial factors are in place: a - you’re married to him, b – it’s not a long-term affair, and c - it’s simply a matter of the man wanting a temporary change of scene and a bit of variety fanny-wise. Show me a man who doesn’t want this, and I’ll show you a flying pig. No matter how happy he is with his wife. But there’s far too much to say on this subject, and it deserves a whole separate post to itself some other time, so I’ll leave it there.

With Compliments 2 : Bidisha Of The Day

2010-09-07T12:31:00.002+01:00

Now, you probably already know how I feel about Bidisha of the Guardian.

I don’t hate Bidisha of the Guardian. ‘Hate’ is far too extreme and dramatic a word to describe my feelings towards her. On the rare occasions that I genuinely hate perfect strangers, the strangers in question are those sick subhuman monsters who blatantly and unambiguously deserve it. Creatures of such blood-curdling evil and malevolence as to deny the existence of a rational god. People like Hitler and Mugabe and Danielle Lloyd.

But for me, Bidisha of the Guardian never fails to provoke an irritable eye-roll to heaven. She’s as dogmatic, rabid and obsessively ‘all-men-are-evil-oppressors’ one-track-minded as Andrea Dworkin - only unlike Andrea Dworkin, she doesn’t have the defence of being stark raving swivel-eyed batshit. Bidisha’s brand of po-faced right-on humorless earnestness is altogether more tiresome than raving insanity. I quite like raving insanity, in moderation.

In fact, I quite liked old Andrea, God rest her soul. You don’t get that many people with the guts to just say whatever the hell they want, however unfashionable and unorthodox it happens to be – an oddly refreshing approach in this Blair-inspired, spin-obsessed day and age (for much the same reasons, I also quite like Ann Widdecombe and Prince Philip). If Andrea Dworkin hadn’t hit the feminist-icon lottery, she wouldn’t have looked out of place staggering about near a Tooting Broadway bus queue waving a half-empty can of White Lightning and a walking stick and screaming something incoherent about fucking bastards.

Whereas Bidisha’s so relentlessly sober and finger-waggingly earnest it makes your arse ache. As with the Mail’s Richard Littlejohn, you get the feeling she may have been grown by her host paper in a test tube - or specially bred by them in an enclosed facility, like Jeff Goldblum’s son in The Fly 2. Raised from birth on a scientifically formulated diet of mung beans and diversity co-ordinators and Fair Trade coffee beans and cartoons about social workers.

That’s why she hasn’t got a surname.

She is Bidisha of the Guardian.

Anyway, she’s on stellar form here.

I mean, take this bit:

‘The homeless guy who said to a friend, "Got a light? No? Well, you're looking quite smoking to me, babe." One afternoon at a road crossing in Covent Garden a man turned around and began harassing the woman next to me: "Hello! How are you, darling? You are so pretty. You look like a supermodel. Where are you going?" She didn't reply, he didn't stop. All these arseholes would say they were "only" complimenting their victims.’

Oh for fuck’s sake.

It is a compliment, you silly cow.

At the risk of stating the bloody obvious, there’s all the difference in the world between bad things, such as insults and threats, and good things, such as courtesies and compliments.

Of course, if a man says you’re fat or ugly or a whore, this is a Very Bad Thing. Or if he rapes you, or if he punches you in the face. Or if he hides outside your house and watches you with binoculars and leaves bouquets of dead flowers and small moribund rodents outside your front door every morning. If you’ve been victim to anything like this, I have the utmost sympathy. I quite agree the guy is a dangerous scumbag. When it comes to opposing this sort of thing, we are one, sisters.

But how the hell this sort of violent furious get-the-hell-away from-me, how-dare-you, you-sick-fuck reaction applies to perfectly harmless flirting, gestures of gentlemanly courtesy, and actively complimentary attention, I really can’t begin to fathom.

It’s like one of those stupid tests people give kids to see if they’re retarded.

Which of the following things is different from the other things in this list:

a) A black eye
b) A fractured jaw
c) A violent rape
d) The phrase ‘you look nice today, sweetheart’

I can’t even imagine how rude and obnoxious these uber-feminists are in day-to-day life. They’ll go mental over the tiniest little thing, and haven’t even got the basic human decency to keep their mentalness to themselves.

In fact, they’ll even brandish it self-righteously like a badge of honour or a victory flag. And complain that they’re being called bossy, strident and paranoid because they’re a woman and a victim of gender inequality and insidious misogyny is infiltrating the English language.

Whereas I think it’s fairly obvious that, when the Bidishas of this world are called bossy, strident and paranoid, it’s actually because they’re, um, bossy, strident and paranoid. And a huge self-righteous pain in the arse. And won’t be happy till the sexual dynamics of the world resemble those in Orwell’s 1984 (how interchangeably equal men and women are in that world – and how much fun everyone’s having!) and their shouty, shrill, touchy-as-a-skinned-rabbit bullshit ends up fucking things up for normal women who’d far rather be called ‘babe’ than ‘comrade.’

For example, men holding doors open for women. Not only is it not bad when it happens, it’s extremely bad when it doesn’t - although you can’t automatically blame men for not doing it any more. If you see a guy who lets the door slam in the face of a woman coming up behind him, don’t judge him too harshly. However damning it may appear to the casual eye, it’s not necessarily that he’s a rude boorish ignorant pikey twat with the social skills of a hyena on a croquet lawn. He may well have been conditioned out of this behavior by some po-faced feminazi giving him an earful of unexpected abuse - and making him feel like Ted Bundy for a gesture that’s just basic good manners.

You don’t risk something like that happening twice.

As for women greeting perfectly pleasant, complimentary chat-up lines with a freezing stare, deadly silence or an outright accusation of harassment, I can’t help considering this downright rude.

You don’t need to be a man to see that the obvious psychological response to such a churlish reaction will be something along the lines of ‘well, fuck you too. Bitch.’

Really, how hard is it to smile and say ‘thanks very much – but I’m afraid I’ve got a boyfriend’?

Off-topic, I remember reading a similarly-minded woman complaining about her gym class on the Guardian or somewhere similar. Or possibly a site called the F Word, which achieves the seemingly impossible by making Bidisha look like Paris Hilton. It is, by a country mile, the most relentlessly dowdy and dungaree-clad corner of the entire internet. You get the feeling it’s infested with dourly self-important pasty undergraduates with Coke-bottle specs, hairy upper lips, dubious personal hygiene and hidden self-mutilation scars - who think it’s the fault of the sinister and all-powerful world patriarchy that Tarquin from the Philosophy department said he just liked her as a friend, and all the boys in St Cockwits Hall keep staring at that blonde with the tits.

Anyway, this woman found it offensive that the male instructor of her all-female gym class would - in his mid-track exhortations - make joking references to toning up for the beach and getting sexy legs. She considered it distasteful and inappropriate, as she was attending the class purely for the sake of her health and well-being – and was appalled by the implicit presumption that women exercising must be doing it in order to appear more sexually attractive.

From the barrage of earnest replies, the general consensus seemed to be that she should speak to the instructor at the end of the class - and tell him that she found his comments to be offensive, sexist and inappropriate. And that she would appreciate it if they were not repeated in the future, or she would refer the matter to management.

Even though I’d never met any of these people, I found myself rooting for the unknown class instructor to tell the unknown woman to get over herself and fuck off.

Ideally in front of the whole class.

And then they could all start applauding.

That’s a life-affirming image if ever there was one.

But back to the point.

Compliments are compliments. They are good things. They make life a little bit nicer. That’s just my opinion, I hasten to add. Everything I say on here is. If you feel differently, feel free to let me know. Or keep your thoughts to yourself and go in peace, and no hard feelings. I’m certainly not preaching to anyone, and I’d be aghast if anyone thought I was.

But here’s a little vignette from my own life.

There is a stall on a nearby corner which lies between my house and a shop I have to go to occasionally. The men on it seem to believe I am Megan Fox. I’m not sure why, and I certainly don’t get anywhere near this amount of attention elsewhere (or from anyone I actually want, but that’s beside the point.) From this particular stall, I will get very loud and audible whistles and calls, so that other people passing by will hear and stop and look round. Sometimes, if I’m looking rough, I’ll deliberately bypass it and take a detour, as it’s too awkward otherwise, and you can actually see visible thought bubbles hanging over the heads of passers-by: ‘why are those blokes on that stall making such a disproportionate fuss over that nondescript-looking munter?’

It is annoying. It is embarrassing. It is intrusive. It is, when I feel compelled to make the detour, tiresomely time-consuming.

It is also extremely flattering.

The Wire’s own Marlo Stanfield might call it ‘one of those good problems.’

And when it stops happening, a little part of myself will die.

Yet any online debate about this sort of thing instantly provokes a veritable flurry of female bitching and moaning. Comments like ‘I can’t go anywhere without having perverts hassling me,’ and ‘I get it everywhere I go, haven’t they ever seen a pair of tits before,’ and ‘I get whistled at and chatted up twenty times a day just walking into work, it’s disgusting, haven’t these men got anything better to do.’

Complaints that combine the very worst aspects of female nature - as militant and charmless as a Seventies bra-burner, and as breathtakingly conceited as a Premiership WAG.

You really want to say, ‘well, just wait a few years and you’ll have your wish, love. Total, absolute sexual invisibility. You can walk past a building site bollock naked and the guys on that site won’t give a rat’s arse.’

Although then again, they’d probably whinge about that too.

There’s no pleasing some slags.

J x

Deja Eeeew

2010-09-06T12:49:00.001+01:00

I was just reading this incredibly unnerving story about the kidnap and imprisonment of Natascha Kampusch.

Details of her abductor Wolfgang Priklopil’s rancidly creepy character came crawling and squirming out into the light like pallid, freakish, insectile horrors disturbed by an overturned stone.

The obsession with under-aged girls, and the twisted conviction that female sexuality and puberty were a manifestation of loathsomeness deserving of masculine punishment.

The Aspergerish obsession with micro-managing a female and controlling every aspect of her appearance and behaviour.

The buck-toothed school nerd’s thinly-veiled terror and hatred of women, covered over with a hasty dustsheet of equally nerdish high-protocol kink. Call me Maestro. Call me Master. Obey. Obey. Obey.

The weirdly old-fashioned, quasi-Talibanic preoccupation with female obedience, modesty, inferiority and submission.

The dark, warped, clammily haunting view of the natural order of things between men and women, and how their relationships should be structured. Like the deformed bastard child of the sickest BDSM porn and the kitschiest Fifties sitcom.

The manipulative attempts to tell his under-aged lady love she was fat and ugly – and the conviction that 6 stone was a good weight for a girl.

The extreme right-wing politics and racist tendencies.

And running through the structure of his sickness like dry rot, the whiny, slimy. insidious conviction that he was a good man who only wanted to be loved – and was only doing these things for Natascha’s own good.

As I read the first instalment of Natascha Kampusch’s grotesquely compelling true story, I had an increasingly unsettling feeling of déjà vu.

I’d seen this man somewhere before.

And then it dawned on me.

When Wolfgang Priklopil gave his regards to Broadway, jumped in front of a train and set sail for the seventh circle of hell, the world en masse merely lost a blood-curdling sicko.

A well-known American MRA/PUA blogger lost a devoted fan.

Ah, well. Plenty more where ole Wolfie came from.

Don’t have nightmares.

J x

How To Look Shit Naked

2010-09-01T12:51:00.001+01:00

Okay. This is probably going to get nasty.

So in a spirit of compromise and cowardice, I’ll just quickly cover my own arse first.

Unlike many of the MRA* commenters out there in the blogosphere, I don’t believe that a woman’s sexual life and desirability come to a screeching halt aged 25.

‘Well, you wouldn’t,’ I hear you say, ‘because you’re a woman over thirty.’

Except, if you know me well, you’ll know it isn’t denial. I don’t do denial. Or rose-tinted mirror-gazing. Or self-delusion. If I did any of these things, I wouldn’t come across as so mind-bogglingly nasty and unsympathetic, and I’d probably have got myself a book deal off this bloody thing two years ago.

I’m just not buying this oft-espoused theory that all women are effortlessly lissome and luminous-skinned young goddesses at sixteen, who will inevitably begin the slow slide into podgy wrinkled invisibility around the age of 25. If anything, my own trajectory’s gone the other way.

Maybe I was lucky to have been cursed with a mind-blowingly shitty metabolism from birth - so even at the allegedly magical and super-skinny age of sixteen, it was bloody hard work staying below a size 12, and there was no sudden shock when I started having to work at keeping the pounds off. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

I was also lucky to have the sort of thick oily olive skin you really, really don’t want in your teens, which gradually reveals itself to be harder-wearing and less line-prone than the more desirable porcelain variety – a leather jacket as opposed to a lace slip.

Above all, I was lucky to single-handedly constitute the entire minority ethnic population of my home town. Because the consequent racist bullying and ingrained neuroses meant I had absolutely no intention of looking even more ethnic than I already did – and I have consequently avoided sun, sunbathing and sunbeds like a mad motherfucker ever since I was old enough to put on super-strength sunblock and sit under a big umbrella.

None of these are exactly the sort of gifts you want a good fairy to offer you at birth, but as anti-ageing goes, I haven’t been badly served.

Anyway, I will restate - just to set the scene before I start with my potentially controversial comments - I know for a fact that a lot of the older-woman-hate is vicious scaremongering by men who couldn’t get a shag in a brothel with a black AmEx card tucked down their pants.

And there is absolutely no need to become leathery, lusterless, invisible or saggy in your thirties, so long as you know the whereabouts of your factor 30, your vitamin pills, your nearest supplier of Crème de la Mer and your local gym.

But there’s fight-the-good-fight optimism and there’s that well-known river in Egypt.

And this sort of thing is so far down that fabled river, it’s about to get eaten by a sodding crocodile.

I’m sorry but anyone who looks at these two photos of Gail Porter and claims that the second is in any way, shape or form comparable to the first is either delusional beyond human belief or a more bare-faced liar than Tony Blair.

I can’t remember the last time I read the comments on any news article, rolled my eyes so often, or thought so often ‘bitch, please.’

The only little chinks of eye-dazzling reality that come shining into the debate – people truthfully pointing out that she looks fucking awful and should have kept her kit on - are instantly greeted with a hail of red arrows and hostility.

‘Ooh, so I suppose you’d look better than Gail Porter posing naked like that at the age of nearly forty. You must think you’re really hot.’

Well, regular readers – at least, those who got Bs or above on their reading comprehension exercises back at school - will know damn well that I don’t think I’m any such thing.

But, and this is important, I’m not emblazoning my arse over a major national newspaper for all the world to see.

If I was, before doing this, I’d need to be damn sure that the arse in question didn’t look flatter, sorrier and more battered by the passage of time than the Twin Towers on September 12th 2001.

Veering briefly off-topic, I’ve always thought this ‘well, you can’t criticize it because you couldn’t do any better’ argument was lame.

‘Oh, so you could direct a better movie than Pearl Harbour?’

Well no, which is why I don’t get paid twenty million dollars a year to direct fucking movies. If you do, and the best you can come up with is that Godawful piece of soulless hacked-out shit, you’re an asshole and a fraud and you deserve all the criticism the viewing public can throw at you.

Followed to its logical conclusion, this attitude means you shouldn’t be allowed to complain about anything you can’t do yourself. If you get on a plane and find the pilot starts impersonating Maverick’s moves in Top Gun mid-flight. Or if you go to a Michelin-starred restaurant to find your £35 fillet steak resembles something recently exhumed from the La Brea tar pits.

Or if a close relative goes into hospital for major brain surgery and emerges with their brain removed and replaced by a Spongebob Squarepants doll.

‘Oh, so you could have done it better? All right, smartarse, here’s the scalpel. Take it away.’

But anyway, back to the point.

With all these commenters wittering on about the ‘bravery’ of Gail Porter’s decision to bare all once more, and the empowering nature of her naked pose – I feel an eye roll deluxe coming on.

Can someone please explain to me why it’s seen as some sort of feminist triumph when a woman who looks as rough as a badger’s arse gets them out for the camera?

Why is it that the most degrading objectifying anti-woman spectacles of all time suddenly become ‘empowering’ when they’re shamelessly rigged to pretend that saggy old munters look hot?

I mean, think of a woman posing naked in a shop window for a crowd of ogling men outside.

If it’s some devastatingly beautiful teenage Victoria’s Secret model, the spectacle will be widely greeted with fury and anger and contempt. A disgusting spectacle that’s clearly responsible for perverted men and anorexia and paedophilia and domestic violence and God knows what.

If it’s some fifty year old dinner lady doing it for How To Look Good Naked and putting all the passing motorists off their lunch, then it’s ‘you go, girlfriend! Self-esteem-building or what? How empowering is that!’

Or the way traditional beauty contests are bay-uddd. And misogynistic and outdated and vile. And a bunch of girls parading in bikinis viciously competing for the title of Miss Beach Body or Miss England is clearly pandering to the very crassest and most hateful male fantasies, and should have been outlawed fifty years ago.

Unless, of course, the ladies in question are viciously competing for the title of Miss Real Beauty Or Miss Plus Size or Miss Don’t Fancy Yours Much. In which case, their wobbly-bottomed progress across the creaking stage is a wonderful, joyous celebration of life and femininity and the universe and everything.

I find this sort of thing annoying and patronizing beyond belief.

It’s like celebrating the high jump as being an empowering activity for paraplegics – when all that happens is that some well-meaning muppet fires them out of an underpowered cannon, they crash onto a padded mat six feet away, and everyone has to stand around and clap supportively. ‘Well, I thought they were wonderful. What a superb athlete.’

If you can’t compete on a level playing field, you can’t compete. For the love of all things holy, put ‘em away.

Maybe tangentially, I’m reminded of Jessica Simpson.

I can’t help remembering that, not long ago, any reference to her on the Mail’s website would be greeted with a tsunami of venomous hatred from not-jealous-in-the-slightest women, who didn’t want a figure like hers in the Dukes of Hazzard at all. Because actually, if you looked closely, she had short legs and a funny nose and little squinty eyes and it was just all the hair and the tits and she couldn’t act and she was thick as shit anyway.

How happy she must be that, today, these ladies have all done a massive U-turn – and now consider her a classically beautiful vision of feminine loveliness and down-to-earth charm.

The fact that she’s gained about five stone since her drop-dead heyday and is no longer any sort of threat to anyone has nothing to do with it.

On the off-chance that there are any female celebs reading this - the second women start liking you, you’ve let yourself go. Start dieting and exercising until they’re calling you a brainless plastic bitch again.

Hate mail to the usual address…

J x

*I think this stands for Mentally Retarded Assholes. Although it may also stand for Misogynistic Rapists Associated. The jury’s out.

** Incidentally, is it just me, or did our Tone miss a trick when he called his autobiography The Journey? I think The Blair Rich Project has a much better ring to it…

EQ&A

2010-08-26T13:25:00.001+01:00

From recent comments on my last post, I just had to clarify regarding the ‘I can’t believe you asked him about his dating history, don’t you realize you were putting him on the spot’ issue.

First and foremost, I’m quite aghast that you’d think I’d make such a faux pas.

For me, the only reason I’d ever, ever, ever ask this question is if the guy asked me the same question first.

Which was what happened on this particular occasion.

Well, fair’s fair. If someone hits you with the dating equivalent of ‘so tell me about your weaknesses’, it’s only right that you get to hit them back with it when you’ve finished answering yourself.

Personally, I’m always immensely careful and circumspect about answering this question.

While there’s a very real chance that I’m actually not ‘over’ my ex at all, I will – if called upon to describe him and how it ended - use phrases such as ‘really good guy,’ ‘perfectly amicable,’ ’both agreed that,’ ‘shame, but,’ and ‘just too different.’

I will most certainly not use phrases such as ‘fucking wanker’, ‘just used me and lied to me and threw me aside the second he got bored,’ ‘dumped me out of the blue the day before my birthday,’ ‘’left me devastated for months on end,’ ‘like to see him meet someone else who treats him a tenth as well as I did,’ ‘hope his new girlfriend’s a fucking violent paranoid mental case like his ex was,’ and ‘when she smashes up his car and sticks his cat in the microwave I hope he cries himself to sleep for two years and wishes he’d stayed with me.’

I will not say this sort of thing on a date any more than I’ll say ‘excuse me for a moment, I just need to go to the ladies and change my tampon before I start leaking.’

Three short words; Ain’t Gonna Happen.

This is because, in my humble opinion, implying too much love or hatred for your most recent ex is a very, very, very bad thing. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realise there’s no man on earth who wants to be the Edgar Linton to someone else’s Heathcliff (or, conversely, any woman who wants to be the Isabella to someone else’s Cathy Earnshaw.)

Who the hell wants to get into a new relationship where you’ll be constantly dealing with the psychological, financial and emotional wreckage left behind by someone else’s grand doomed reckless passion? It’s like being dragged into someone else’s house to clear up the mess from a party you weren’t even invited to.

Insult, meet Injury.

As Jean-Paul Sartre once said in his wisdom, ‘fuck that shit.’

Which makes it all the more bizarre that so many men don’t seem to understand this at all, and will pour out a torrid tale of heartbreak, loss, betrayal and emotional devastation as if they were lying on a psychiatrist’s couch. Always some super stunning evil grasping bitch from hell who was as palpably, immediately, obviously insane as the gurning Nazi-esque surgeon in The Human Centipede.

Initial warning bells should perhaps have gone off on their first date, when she punched the waiter/injected heroin at the table/threw someone’s cat in a wheelie bin. Nonetheless he fell hopelessly in love and married her a month later/ a week later/ a day later. He bought her a Ferrari Spider/a million-pound diamond ring/a small Greek island. She repaid him by shagging his brother/destroying his career/cutting his balls off. To this day, he remains bankrupt/ emotionally shattered/singing in a soprano choir. But she was stunning/beautiful/incredibly gorgeous. And probably an ex-model. Or Russian.

The ubiquity of this story is quite mystifying, because it really doesn’t cast its male protagonists in a good light at all. So if they’re saying it to make themselves look good, they’re going about it in entirely the wrong way.

Actually, and ironically, it would cast them in a better light if the woman in question was a bit of a munter.

I mean, they’d still come across as gullible, stupid, naive and possessed of the worst judgment since Coca-Cola decided what the world really needed was expensively bottled tap water with extra added cancer.

But at least they wouldn’t come across as a sad, shallow pervert to boot.

For me, this sort of thing is the dating equivalent of getting that ‘what are your weaknesses?’ question in a job interview. And answering ‘actually, I skive off and pull sickies whenever I get the chance. I’m a bit light-fingered too, truth to tell. Nicked a brand-new laptop from my last place, and they never knew it was me. Fired the janitor over it. Dicks.’

Got another date tonight, anyway. Another Hercule Poirot-worthy case of greed, intrigue and evil to discover.

This time, I reckon it was Miss Utterly Gorgeous, in the multi-million-pound dressing room, with the pack of lies and the evil scheming divorce lawyer.

Might be wrong, though. Will keep you posted.

J x

Things I'd Like To Have Said To An Otherwise Attractive Man I Recently Went On A Date With

2010-08-25T12:47:00.002+01:00

Oh, no. Not you too.

Another stunningly beautiful but psychotically unstable evil ex-wife who you treated like a princess and who did nothing in return but bleed you dry.

My heart pumps purple piss for you.

You do realize that, if I had a penny for every time I’d heard this exact same story on a first date, I’d have – well, about 9p actually, but that’s almost halfway towards loo fare at Victoria Station. And that’s nothing to be sniffed at.

And it was all going so, so well up till then.

I wish I’d never asked about your relationship history. Can I just press rewind on this evening and go back to ten minutes ago?

Oh, but she was very, very beautiful. Wow, there’s a surprise. Never heard that one before, either.

And a psycho.

She didn’t gradually turn into a psycho. She was exhibiting clear psycho symptoms pretty much from the first time you met her – and you still left your first wife for her three months later.

She frequently slashed her wrists and threatened suicide. She was an alcoholic. She was on coke. She spent five grand of your money on a monthly basis, and refused point blank to get any sort of job of her own.

But you stayed with her for six years.

Because she was very, very beautiful.

Christ, you fucking men are so fucking predictable.

Can you even begin to understand how many times I’ve heard this exact same story – with the most minor and trivial variations imaginable?

And why the hell do you think I want to hear it?

Do you think it’s somehow making you more attractive in my eyes?

Do you think that, when you walked into the venue of our date two hours ago, I thought to myself, ‘hmm, he looks quite attractive in a Jeremy Paxman sort of way. But what would really make me go for him is a hard-luck story implying he’s mind-meltingly shallow, with the worst judgment this side of Sarah Ferguson, the sort of gullibility that buys the Brooklyn Bridge off a shifty-eyed stranger down the pub, no remaining money and a roiling internal ocean of self-righteous passive-aggression.

‘Oh and a super-sized chip on his shoulder against women he’s apt to take out on anyone but the megabitch responsible for putting it there. With whom he still very obviously has a planet-sized obsession, and whose insanely extravagant lifestyle he’s still single-handedly bankrolling.

‘And I’ve always desperately wanted a man who’ll be gone like a cool breeze out of my life the second Little Miss Mental Illness slashes her wrists again and starts screaming she can’t live without him. Because I’m so sorry Juliette but she needs me and she didn’t mean to steal that forty grand out of my bank account and she only shagged those delivery boys because she felt like I wasn’t there for her.’

You know, I didn’t actually think this.

I hate to break this to you, but your tragic tale of woe doesn’t make you sound like a heroic Samson Agonistes betrayed by an evil Delilah.

It makes you sound like a humungous liability with the depth of a centipede’s footbath and the emotional intelligence of a dead slug.

Jesus, I should have been a shrink or a marriage guidance counsellor. At least then I’d have got paid for this sympathetic, non-judgemental, I-am-manfully-refraining-from-calling-you-a-fucking-retard good listener schtick.

Maintaining this wise sympathetic understanding expression is bloody hard work. My eyes are starting to glaze over. I’m slowly but surely losing the will to live.

How about I retaliate with a story about my ex?

He was so beautiful he made Johnny Depp look like Johnny Vegas. He thought he was Napoleon and wore his underpants on his head. He smoked crack for breakfast and threw the Rolex I got him out of the window. I bought him a Ferrari every year for his birthday and gave him seven thousand pounds spending money every week, and even now he’s stolen my life savings and left me for my sister, I still send him nine tenths of my salary each month as a gesture of goodwill. I wouldn’t want to hurt him. He’s very, very beautiful. Unfortunately this means I’m now living in a cardboard box and eating out of dustbins because I haven’t got any money left, but I’m seeing a psychiatrist once a week to help me get over what he did to me, so I might vaguely resemble an emotionally healthy and non-toxic human being again at some point over the next twenty years or so. Oh, and did I mention that he was very, very beautiful?

You fancy me more now I’ve told you all that, right?

Wow, you don’t?

Actually, I was just kidding. My ex was butt-ugly and I didn’t buy him shit, because unlike you I’m not a fucking imbecile.

Yes, it’s been a lovely evening. I’m glad I met you too.

Do I want to do it again next week some time?

Tell you what.

I’ll call you.

J x

(By the way - I just saw this picture of the Home Counties’ answer to Patrick Bateman, puked corrosive bile all over the paper, then ate it. My transformation into the political version of Brundlefly is almost complete. I’m thinking of starting a video diary.)

Tales From The Script: This Time It's Shit

2010-08-24T12:53:00.002+01:00

The Human Centipede

By Tom Sixx and Juliette

(Hotel room in Germany – two ANNOYING AMERICAN SKANKS are getting ready for a night out on the town.)

SKANK 1 - Like wow!

SKANK 2 - Like totally!

SKANK 1 - Like awesome!

SKANK 2 - Like let’s go!

(ANNOYING AMERICAN SKANKS’ car breaks down – they trek through a dark forest in the pouring rain.)

SKANK 1 - Omigod!

SKANK 2 - Like – omigod!

SKANK 1 - Omigod, there’s a house!

SKANK 2 - Like – let’s go knock!

(They approach a creepy modernist mansion in the middle of nowhere. The freakiest-looking man you’ve ever seen in your entire fucking life comes to the door. He looks like what Kyle McLachlan might look like after a particularly horrific car crash, and apparently buys all his clothes from Nazi Tailors ‘R’ Us.)

GLARINGLY OBVIOUS PSYCHOPATH – Are you alone?*

SKANK 1 - Like, we sure are!

GLARINGLY OBVIOUS PSYCHOPATH - Does anyone else know you’re here?

SKANK 2 - Like, not a soul!

SKANK 1 - Like, we totally hope we don’t get kidnapped by some one-dimensional and breathtakingly hammy psychopathic genius surgeon reminiscent of Vincent Price playing Dr Mengele. If that happened, the police wouldn’t know where to start looking!

GLARINGLY OBVIOUS PSYCHOPATH - Come in and I will get you a strangely bitter-tasting drink while I phone for help in a room where you can vaguely hear me but can’t see what I’m doing, and I might just be talking into a dead phone.

SKANK 1 – Gee, thanks!

SKANK 2 -Like, that’s real good of you!

(Inside creepy mansion. There’s strange gruesome artworks on the walls depicting Siamese twins.)

SKANK 1 - Do you live here with your wife?

GLARINGLY OBVIOUS PSYCHOPATH - I live alone. I do not like human beings.*

SKANK 2 - Well gee, mister, you’d think you’d try to conceal your true psychotic nature a bit more carefully. If we weren’t total and utter fucking retards you’d have lost us ten minutes ago, and we’d now be racing back through the dark rainy forest screaming for help. Luckily for you, we’re stupider than any other horror characters you’ve ever seen. Even the ones who hear a funny noise in their back garden late at night and go out alone in a tiny negligee calling ‘Hello? Hello, is anyone there?’ We make those chicks look like Albert Einstein.

GLARINGLY OBVIOUS PSYCHOPATH - Well, help will be here soon, so drink your Rohypnol. Did I say Rohypnol? I meant Ovaltine.

SKANK 1 - This drink tastes – kind of bitter…

SKANK 2 - I feel – kind of sleepy…

GLARINGLY OBVIOUS PSYCHOPATH – Well, duh.

(ANNOYING AMERICAN SKANKS wake up in starkly-lit underground lair beside angry Japanese man. All of them are tied to hospital beds)

PSYCHOPATH - I’m a brilliant yet insane surgeon who wants to sew three people together into a human centipede. Allow me to do a quick Powerpoint presentation. You’ll be joined end-to-end, via your intestinal tract. Mouths sewn to arses. Pretty sick, right?

SKANK 1 - Omigod - why are you doing this?

PSYCHOPATH - Because it’s gross and high concept, that’s why. I have always dreamed of the Godlike power of getting millions of viewers to watch a film with no tension, characterization, wit, drama or suspense whatsoever, simply because it gets reviews saying it’s totally eeeewwww and the sickest thing ever and foolish people want to know what all the fuss is about. Here is a quick Powerpoint presentation of how I will then surgically attach six extra noughts to my bank balance.

SKANK 2 - But – why?

PSYCHOPATH (rolling eyes) Well, obviously, there’s no other reason for me doing this whatsoever. I don’t even have the lame self-help-guru-from-hell motivations of Jigsaw off the Saw movies. I’m a mad Nazi-esque doctor who wants to create a human centipede because I’ve always dreamed of having this weird-looking thing lumbering round my house and screaming at me in incoherent Japanese. What more do you need to know?

JAPANESE MAN - Well - how are you going to get any more tension out of this situation? I mean, okay, one of us can make the obligatory unsuccessful attempt at escape – maybe coming a whisker away from freedom, and then idiotically turning back to drag our friend out too, and then getting caught. But after that, once you’ve joined us together, the film has to spend about half of its running time with absolutely nowhere left to go. We can’t escape, we can’t run and we can’t even be rescued - as we’ve now been crippled and permanently mutilated, making it point blank impossible for us to ever return to a normal life. So it’s pretty much game over for all three of us then and there.

SKANK 2 - Yeah, and there’s only so much tension the audience can get out of you taking us for a walk and hitting us with a riding crop while the direction implies we’re pooing into one another’s mouths. Combined with your outrageously camped-up and implausible performance, it’s just going to look like some weird out-take from The League of Gentlemen. Or something you might find in the special interest section of an Amsterdam porn shop.

PSYCHOPATH – Bollocks, I never thought of that. Well here’s something scary and terrifyingly ominous for you. This film’s called The Human Centipede: First Sequence, which strongly suggests the likelihood of a sequel. If you think the next half hour of film you’re about to watch is pointless and boring, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

(The newly-created HUMAN CENTIPEDE lumbers around with bloodstained bandages on its mutilated kneecaps. The PSYCHO hits it with a riding crop, having gone back to Nazi Tailors ‘R’ Us for a lab coat. Yelling ‘feed her, feed her’ in a manner that makes Vincent Price at his hammiest look like he deserved a Best Actor Oscar. JULIETTE gets the giggles, then wonders with guilt and alarm if she’s appallingly desensitized to on-screen horrors and whether anything she ever sees in any horror film will ever genuinely disturb her again. THE TWO STUPIDEST COPS EVER BORN come to interview the PSYCHO and go away again. Because you know, it’s apparently not enough that he’s got a giant neon sign hanging over his head saying I AM A PSYCHO. They finally come back but fail to find the human centipede, the Japanese guy kills himself, one of the American skanks dies of blood poisoning, the PSYCHO dies. Blah blah blah.)

ANNOYING AMERICAN SKANK – Oh great, now I’ve got my mouth sewn to a dead guy’s butt and another dead woman’s mouth surgically attached to my own. Well at least I should be rescued soon, assuming those cops were bright enough to let someone know where they were going before they got here. On second thoughts – oh, shit. I’m screwed.

THE END

*These are actual lines of dialogue from the film. No shit, if you’ll pardon the phrase.

PS – Sorry for all the film scripts and lack of personal stuff - I’m creeping through the treacherous minefield of internet dating once more, but fear of breaking that pesky fourth wall is keeping my experiences to myself for now. You never know who reads what blog-wise, or who’s going to put two and two together if they read an online account that’s oddly similar to their own recent date.

Incidentally, my hideous metamorphosis into the left-wing version of The Fly progresses apace. This morning, I found myself nodding in agreement as I read a Polly Toynbee article. It was like the bit where a bug-eyed Jeff Goldblum realizes he can peel his nails off. I’m still shaking. Help me.

Tales From The Script: This Time It's History

2010-08-19T13:04:00.002+01:00

The History Boys

By Alan Bennett and Juliette

(Group of impossibly neat wholesome-looking boys come running into impossibly neat wholesome-looking classroom. The boys’ ties are slightly askew, demonstrating the fact that, while bright, they are rebellious and unruly.)

BOYS: Hey, cool, wow, awesome, shit! We’re a bunch of bright yet rebellious and unruly sixteen-year-old boys as fondly remembered by a dusty old git who can’t remember anything whatsoever about the sixteen-year-old experience, but is sure it must have been enormous fun.

DAKIN: I’m the good-looking arrogant but good-natured jack the lad one everyone likes or fancies. You probably knew someone just like me at school, if you went to a school for shitty cardboard-cut-out nicey-nice stereotypes.

POSNER: I’m a tormented gay boy in love with the good-looking jack the lad one. You know this because I say so. Out loud. All the damn time. In front of him and everyone else. I even sing a song about how much I love him with the whole class watching. And everyone laughs. In a nice friendly harmless affectionate way because it’s that sort of movie. Seriously, it would be a hell of a lot more plausible if my classmates stripped, tarred and feathered me and chased me off the premises throwing stones at my departing back. Or if we all turned into giant carrots and flew off to space.

OLD TEACHER: I’m the loveable old teacher who is eccentric and charming, and also a predatory nonce, but it’s okay because the boys like it really.

BOY: He’s always squeezing our arses. It’s hilarious. Bless him.

OTHER BOY: Nothing brightens my day like having some freaky-looking old pervert offering me a lift on his ridiculous motorbike and then grabbing my balls at a traffic light.

OLD TEACHER: Now if you’d all turn to page 97, we can have an impromptu fun lively playacting of the historical debate ‘why the holy Christ was the play this movie’s based on such a massive hit when it’s a pile of plotless, unfunny, unrealistic, drama-free, tension-free, soporifically boring old shite?’ Dakin, you can be Alan Bennett, I’ll be some really important theatrical agent and you can pretend you’re sucking my cock.

HEAD (barging in): I’m the stroppy officious Head, and I want more of our boys to get into Oxford. I should be a nasty bit of work, but the play’s too lame and cosy and toothless to make me actually despicable or someone you can root against. It’s all so fucking nicey-nice and pointless, it makes Last of the Summer Wine look like Antichrist. Consequently, I’m just an annoying little twat. I want you to stop having fun-yet-educational-bringing-history-to-life lessons where your pupils re-enact scenes of Alan Bennett sucking important theatrical agents off. Instead, I want to sit them down in a giant robot factory learning how to get into Oxford.

SMART ARSED YOUNG TEACHER: I’m the smart arsed young teacher, and I’m here to teach you how to get into Oxford. And you don’t get ahead in life by playacting at being Alan Bennett sucking people’s cocks. You do it by being cynical and heartless and writing essays about why the second world war was brilliant. Be outrageous, provocative, outspoken. In today’s academic world, uninspired passive conformity will get you nowhere.

BOY: Hang on a min. Not being funny, but if you do this shit in real life, they’ll chuck you out for being a weirdo. In today’s academic world, uninspired passive conformity gets you absolutely fucking everywhere. Especially when it’s backed up by slavish reading of all the suicidally boring set texts and a meticulously compiled five-page-long bibliography attached to every damned thing you ever write. And if it’s duller than being stuck in a lift with Ed Balls for two weeks, all the better.

ANOTHER BOY: Yeah, all this reckless maverick stuff might have played when Alan Bennett was at uni back in the Stone Age. These days, it’s about as useful as telling us to say ‘Heil Hitler’ and salute when we walk into the interview room. We do this stuff you recommend in real life, we’d be out on our arse.

SMART ARSED YOUNG TEACHER: Well luckily this isn’t real life, which is why the dynamic between all you two-dimensionally anodyne, non-hierarchical, personality-free and clean-cut kids is so weirdly flat and un-nuanced and cardboard cut-out-y. There’s not the merest whisper of tension between any of you boring little motherfuckers – no rivalries, no jealousies, no antagonisms, no conspiratorial alliances, fuck all. I’ve seen more lively interpersonal chemistry from a flock of sheep.

POSNER: I’m madly in love with Dakin, Sir. That gives me a bit of personality.

SMART ARSED YOUNG TEACHER: Oh, shut the fuck up, Posner. Anyone who has any memory whatsoever of their teenage years knows that shy plain loners in love with the school sex symbol won’t broadcast their feelings with a megaphone to the entire sodding faculty. Your alleged infatuation with Dakin and the way it’s greeted by your peers is the most ridiculous thing in this whole shitty movie. Now I want you all to practice writing an essay on why Stalin’s purges were awesome.

OLD TEACHER (bursting in, crying): Oh no, I’m being fired because someone saw me on my motorbike groping a student’s cock and reported me to the Head!

DAKIN: My God, sir. It’s outrageous that you could lose your teaching job for being a predatory paedophile and as mad as a bag of frogs.

POSNER: We love being taught by an insane nonce.

OLD TEACHER: This is the cold modern world in which we live. Alas, there is no place in it for good old-fashioned values, such as whimsy and wonder and squeezing the genitals of under-aged boys.

BOY: Anyway, on a lighter note, we just got the results of our Oxford interviews back!

OTHER BOY: And guess what? We all passed with flying colours, apart from Dakin, the Boy Most Likely - who everyone said would do best out of the whole year.

PASSING TEACHER (raising a surprised eyebrow) : Wow, I love dramatic surprising endings. Didn’t think it was that sort of movie.

BOY: No, Dakin passed with super-duper flying colours. And he did the best out of the whole year!

JULIETTE: Oh, what-the-fuck-ever.

J x

(I also seem to remember something about a motorbike accident where the old nonce got killed and some twats singing Bye Bye Blackbird - but I was pretty much asleep by that point, so I’m not sure, and I might have dreamed it. I honestly never thought I’d see a film about A-level students that made me think more kindly of Tormented.)

Turning Left

2010-08-18T12:48:00.002+01:00

Well, I’m back from holiday. It’s very, very hard to write about holidays without giving at least some indication of where you were and who you went with. Unfortunately, these are the two things I can’t tell you without walking up to that fourth wall and giving it a damn good push, so you’ll just have to use your imagination.

I was going to write about something funny that happened on the flight back, but that gave too much personal detail away too, so I can’t. You’ve got no idea what a pain in the arse these enforced omissions are. Half the stuff I want to tell you about, it’s like trying to summarise the story of Othello without mentioning Desdemona, the handkerchief or race.

It’s nice to be back, anyway. I was missing the gym, to be honest. I mean, there was a gym in the hotel, but it just wasn’t the same. It was elegant and modern-looking, yet tiny, windowless and subterranean. It looked like what might have happened if Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen had paid a visit on the Fritzl kids.

So now I’m back and I’m reading the English papers. And something very odd indeed is happening.

Every single time I see a picture of David Cameron or George Osborne, I get a little more left-wing.

It’s a peculiar experience, and quite unnerving. I always thought I was sort of centre-rightish, but I’m drifting further and further over to the other side with every passing day. You may have noticed from my recent posts.

Seriously, I’m changing like Jeff Goldblum in the fucking Fly here. Like I got into one of the telepods, and unbeknownst to me there was a stray Guardian editorial buzzing around in the other.

First I start acquiring manic superhuman energy when writing left-wing political posts. Then I acquire terrifying unnatural strength when tearing copies of Atlas Shrugged in half or hurling a brick through the telly when that tosser Cameron comes on the news. Then I’ll start sprouting strange wiry hair in unusual places as I decide that waxing is a feminist issue and razors are potentially offensive to follically challenged lesbians in the developing world.

And then I’ll start climbing up the walls and crawling across the ceiling when anyone mentions the name of Maggie Thatcher.

Next thing you know, my nail extensions are going to fall off and there will be no hope for me.

You may well be regarding my eerie metamorphosis with the bewilderment of Gena Rowlands watching her scientist lover do backflips from the roof beams and peel his eyelids off.

‘Seth, what’s happening to you? You’re not yourself any more. You keep talking as if the old Labour government was a good thing instead of a total fucking disaster. You’re scaring me.’

My conversion makes no logical sense. I freely admit that. People far more politically informed than my good self think Cameron’s infinitely better than Brown - and who am I to argue with people who know what the Shadow Chancellor’s called, or what the Lib Dem policy is on stamp duty, or what Iain Duncan Smith actually does all day?

Except.

Now, I’m aware that I’m about to fall foul of Godwin’s Law - but I read this long out-of-print book about Stalin written by Martin Amis once. You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you I borrowed it off a guy on a first date, but that’s another story.

I can’t quote from it because I gave it back on the second date (who says romance is dead?), but it refers to how come everyone thinks that Hitler’s Nazis were worse than Stalin’s commies. When by any objective logic – just going on cold factual stats and who-killed-the-most-people – Stalin’s commies were the clear winners in the Unimaginable Evil Race by a street and a half.

Amis said, how do you know the Nazis were worse? There’s no rational answer. But ask your gut, and your gut answers for you. Immediately, and in a voice that can’t be denied.

Which is damn right and highly perceptive, and I say that as someone who normally thinks Martin Amis is an irritating cockweasel – and, to quote Blackadder, the most overrated human being since Judas Iscariot won the Best Disciple award in AD31.

Anyway, my own opinionated gut – diminished by liposuction and crunches as it is - has very similar opinions about the gruesome twosome of Cameron and Osbourne. And why they’re worse than Gordon Brown.

Admittedly, Gordon Brown was no charmer, any more than the late Joe Stalin – a fucking horrible, mentally unstable and despicable parody of a human being, in fact. But when stacked up to such utter slimy vileness as that possessed by his successor, he loses a little of his horror.

Why do I think this? I don’t know. I can’t answer you logically.

Ask my gut.

Damn it, I just saw another picture of that hateful smirking dead-eyed Osborne thing – and moved another half-centimetre to the left on the political compass. I may have to stop watching the news and reading the papers before I get into Das Kapital or Polly Toynbee.

Both Cameron and Osborne, but especially Osborne, are my visual equivalent of hearing inch-long nails screeching down a blackboard while James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful plays in the background on a constant tape loop with the volume turned up to eleven.

George Osborne is a very clubbable fellow.

Assuming the club in question is made of solid oak and has a nail in the end of it.

By the way, on the subject of politics - is it just me who thinks Tony Blair did the right thing giving that £5m to the British Legion? I mean, I can’t stand the guy. I bow to none in my not being able to stand the guy. And I have the rare distinction of honestly being able to say that I’ve felt this way all along, ever since I first saw his smarmy grinning trendy-vicar face appearing on my telly to the strains of Things Can Only Get Better (oh, the irony.)

But the fact remains, regardless of whether he’s personally responsible for the human wreckage that he’s oh-so-generously contributing to clearing up - it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to trouser the £5m regardless, with a private aside of ‘fuck ‘em.’ Not least because he’d have had to tell his wife he was giving it away, and I can’t even begin to imagine her response. I mean fuck, imagine telling Cherie Blair you’re giving £5m of your income to charity. It’d be like Paul McCartney telling the late Linda he was building a state-of-the-art abattoir in the front garden and reinventing himself as a leading manufacturer of foie gras.

To call it ‘conscience money’ sort of misses the point - because to me, this at least implies that Tony Blair has a conscience of some shape, form or description. Which is nothing short of astounding to me, and has changed my opinion of him in grand style. It’s the only thing he’s ever done in his entire political career that’s made me think of him as anything other than a soulless, mindless, gutless, heartless, grasping, greedy, amoral, vacuous, thieving, murdering, pious, hypocritical, contemptible grinning tosser.

Now I just think he’s a contemptible grinning tosser.

So, you know, if the donation thingy was just a cynical PR exercise, he can rest assured that it worked on someone…

J x

A Few Important Things I Have Learned About Relationships And Men

2010-08-17T13:24:00.004+01:00

· What he says he wants, what he thinks he wants and what he actually responds to in real life are three radically different things.

· He says he wants a nice home-loving girl who treats him to home-baked cookies. He thinks he wants a submissive sex kitten who treats him to back rubs and blowjobs. And he will fall like a sack of mail for a frigid, moody, domineering bitch who treats him to ranting plate-throwing tirades about why he hasn’t noticed her new haircut.

· If you seriously want to dump him, for Christ’s sake do it then and there. Worrying about his feelings or the possibility of hurting him is a sure-fire way to prolong a pointless lame-duck relationship for another six or seven interminable months, before the same thing finally occurs to him and he does it to you without a second thought.

· As a corollary to the last point - he doesn’t have feelings. He has an ego and he has a cock. Mistake either of these two things for ‘feelings’ at your peril.

· Contrary to stereotypes of the desirable-yet-callous alpha male and the nerdy-but-nice beta male, it is point-blank impossible to tell who’s a dick and who’s going to treat you badly. Although it’s true that the six foot tall good-looking impeccably-dressed Ferrari-driving multi-millionaire is, indeed, probably a dick – and is, indeed, likely to treat you badly.

· However, and this is important, the short ugly scruffy one with the second-hand car and the teeth like a pan of burnt chips Is also probably a dick – and is likely to do the exact same thing.

· Only without the small consolation prize of knowing you’ve shagged someone that other women might actually want.

· As a general rule of thumb, there’s a 99% probability that he’s a dick – entirely irrespective of what he earns or what he looks like.

· So if you’re going to shag a dick anyway, you might as well shag a sexy glamorous one.

· He will, with aggrieved self-righteousness, expect you to offer him selfless and unconditional love - and will throw his toys out of the pram in grand style at anything remotely resembling a superficial or self-interested motive on your behalf.

· However, he won’t even pretend to offer anything remotely similar to selfless and unconditional love in return.

· His own selfless and unconditional love is offered only up until the point you start looking a bit rough or gain a few pounds or he thinks he can trade you in for someone hotter - at which point, his traditional masculine virtues of lifelong loyalty and unsuperficial devotion will go flying out of a fortieth-storey window to shatter into a million tiny pieces on the ground below.

· He has always been out with a model in the past.

· His most recent ex was always a stunningly beautiful yet evil psychopath who would do anything and everything in bed. I don’t know where they meet these women, as I’ve never seen any women remotely like this in my entire life, unless you count Angelina Jolie movies. Maybe there’s a special dating agency somewhere.

· There are two differences between his genuine deep-rooted opinion of women and that of the average Taliban leader - one, the Taliban leader is less partial to stockings and suspenders, two, the Taliban leader is free to say what the hell he wants without immediately becoming persona non grata everywhere.

· Apart from this, there is no difference.

· He will cheat for the same reason that a dog will lick its own bollocks, and with as little remorse. If he can, he will.

· He is secretly paranoid you are scheming to steal his sperm and trick him into fathering your baby - even though he’s as reliable as an Ethiopian hatchback, as stable as a special needs child on a unicycle, and tricking him into having a baby with you is about as desirable a proposition as tricking Fred and Rosemary West into adopting you as their long-lost child.

You know, I’d really like to meet someone who’s not a total dick before I turn into Julie Bindel.

J x

Rock-A-Bye

2010-08-16T08:49:00.001+01:00

Well, for fourth-wall related reasons, I’m unwilling to give too much information about my holidays.

But I just had to write about my brief and recent stop-off at the strangest little place I’ve ever been to in my life - Gibraltar.

I’m not on holiday here, I hasten to add. Seven days in Gibraltar would tax the patience of a rock.

Seven hours in Gibraltar is pushing it some.

Which I know from personal experience. As, for reasons too complicated and personally-relevant to explain in detail, I recently found myself here for the best part of seven hours.

Christ alive, it’s a weird little neck of the woods. For a start, to say that the airport is the tiniest airport I’ve ever seen in my life doesn’t do it justice. There’s a very real chance your house is bigger than this airport. Your local branch of M and S is certainly bigger than this airport. It’s quite a lot like Victoria Coach Station, only about a tenth of the size and with less in the way of stroppy pigeons and muttering tramps.

Its facilities have an almost communistic democracy to them, far removed from the modern capitalist free-for-all of the rest of the world. So you’ve rocked up with banker-bonus money to burn, and you want a no-expense-spared orgy of caviar and Cristal and £300-a-pop cocktails? Well, that’s just too fucking bad, because all you’re going to get in the solitary café is an elderly and depressed-looking cheese sandwich and a bag of crisps. And none of this ‘sun-dried tomato and hand-cracked black pepper’ Kettle chip malarkey either. You can have prawn cocktail or you can have cheese and onion or you can have salt and vinegar. Or you can have a Kit Kat which doesn’t seem too keen on all this funny foreign sunshine and would have been more advisably kept in the fridge. Your call.

And when it comes to liquid refreshments, you can have whatever you want, so long as you want tea, coffee, diet coke, a bottle of beer or a glass of something that tastes like cat piss and has a suspiciously long fancy French name busily writing cheques its reality can’t cash. It’s like a free bar at a really, really pikey wedding.

If you want to go wandering about for a bit to kill the time, as I did, you’ll realise that Life on Mars was full of shit. You don’t need to go into a coma to revisit the British Seventies. Really, you don’t. All you need to do is to pop into Gibraltar town centre. It’s like a time machine that chucks you out in Swindon High Street, 1974. As with Life on Mars, there’s an indescribable Seventies look to everything. A sort of small-scale, subtly-depressed, faded-round-the-edges look. Everything’s called stuff like Victoria Road and Churchill Avenue and Beaverbrook Street. There’s a haggard old BHS and a weary-looking Marks and Sparks and a scraggy-looking stray Debenhams with ear mites. To say it’s more English than England is like saying that Provence is more French than Tunbridge Wells.

The fish and chips in Gibraltar are damn good, and I know because I stopped off and had some. However if you don’t like chips, you’re rather stuck, because – from the admittedly little I saw while I was there - there’s fuck all to eat in the entire town centre that doesn’t come accompanied by chips. Although in addition to fish, you could have scampi, battered sausage, or a different sort of fish. Even a saveloy, if you wanted to go crazy. Oh, and whatever culinary delights can be found in the local Pizza Hut (which for me, far from home, was as welcome a sight as a freshly laid turd on my hotel pillow.)

This is the land that falafels forgot.

Looking back and trying to identify what was so damned weird – it’s not just what was there, but what wasn’t. There was a Dixons and a Dorothy Perkins and even (if memory serves) an H Samuel. But no Pret a Manger. No Costa Coffee. No Waterstones. No Ernest Jones. No Pizza Express. No Hobbs. Not even a Karen Millen.

And – quite chillingly, in retrospect - no Starbucks.

Spooky. I can’t remember the last time I walked down a high street and didn’t see a Starbucks. Every time I walk into work, I pass three of the bloody things in less than ten minutes.

Starbucks are sort of like skirting boards, in that you don’t like them or have any particular attachment to them - but if you took them out of the picture, the world would look odd and rather alien.

I still hope there was a reassuring little Starbucks tucked away somewhere I couldn’t see it, but I really, really doubt it.

It’s like they imported all our elderly down-at-heel retail outlets, and left all the pretty shiny modern ones to go hang. I bet you can’t buy Innocent smoothies round the ‘hood, either.

But from my brief glimpse into a local estate agent’s window, the local property prices are head-scratchingly insane. This place is as glamorous and sexy as a church-organised jumble sale, and it’s more expensive than living in Chelsea. Someone informed me that very rich people want to live in Gibraltar for tax reasons, but I can only assume the trick is to live here without actually living here. Trying to imagine some megabucks Ferrari-driving tax exile rocking up in Gibraltar is like trying to imagine Paris Hilton in the Croydon Lidl.

I’m gone now, anyway. Thank fuck.

Don’t know if I’d have paid to enter Gibraltar, but I’d certainly have paid to leave…

J x

A Modest Proposal

2010-08-12T13:30:00.002+01:00

I was reading this article about proposed council housing reforms with considerable interest and approval. In fact, I couldn’t agree with David Cameron more.

If you can’t summon up the basic nous to afford a house of your own, I’ve got no sympathy. Round my perfectly ordinary London neighbourhood, three-bedroomed family homes begin at a very reasonable £400K or so, which is surely within the reach of everyone in a full-time skilled or semi-skilled job – I mean, come on, who on earth can’t come up with a £70K or £80K deposit after a few years’ responsible saving?

Such feckless people have clearly abdicated all rights to have a family in the first place, never mind to have a home provided for them. Personally, I’d be inclined to recommend compulsory and irreversible sterilisation for everyone who earns less than £100K a year - and fortunately, with today’s levels of social mobility, experts should be able to predict this with 99% accuracy from the date of a child’s birth. The sterilisation process could therefore be carried out on children of the non-property-owning underclass before they even reach puberty, minimising trauma and ensuring that the process is conducted as humanely as possible.

Yet I can see that I’m ahead of my time here, and that my views may be considered controversial in some of the more bleeding-heart liberal quarters - so I will not press the issue.

While it’s very much what I’d like to see in the future, this proposed reform to council house tenancies is an excellent start. I feel that David Cameron and I are on the same page when it comes to society’s ills.

And it’s for the poor’s own good, of course – and for the good of society as a whole. What will possibly give these so-called ‘council-house tenants’ more incentive to work than the knowledge that, the second their income goes above a certain level, they’ll be thrown out of the home they’ve come to know and love, and onto the famously reliable and trustworthy mercy of private landlords? An enticement like that would have me searching tirelessly to better myself day and night, I can tell you that.

Anyway, what they think or don’t think is irrelevant - as they shouldn’t be entitled to view these state-owned properties as their ‘homes’ in any way, shape or form. The residences are purely temporary shelters for those in genuine need, and any resemblance they may bear to ‘family homes’ as they’re known and inhabited by their betters is purely coincidental.

It initially occurred to me that the problem may derive from council houses’ outward resemblance to proper houses which proper people live in - blurring the crucial distinction between council housing and ‘real’ housing, and encouraging council tenants to adopt the views and attitudes of genuine residents who are entitled to respect and security. This problem could be addressed through a simple and cost-effective measure, making it compulsory for all council houses to have a distinctive sign displayed on their front doors - immediately setting them apart from their neighbours and lowering their visible status and desirability. A large multi-pointed star motif would be both simple and distinctive - and in terms of colour, yellow is easily visible to both sighted and partially-sighted passers-by.

Yet sound as this idea is, I have an even better idea to save this country even more money. A modest proposal which will house and protect those in genuine need, while simultaneously demolishing the outmoded 1970s belief in council homes for life.

At the same time, my proposal will also drastically reduce single motherhood and national obesity levels, while single-handedly destroying the outmoded behemoths of social services, unemployment benefits and state education.

My proposal is a communal, shared form of accommodation which will offer emergency housing for those in genuine need for as long as this is required, yet simultaneously encourage industry and self-reliance. Its name should reflect elements of housing and employment simultaneously, reflecting the dynamic new union it will create between the two.

Which is why I propose giving these new establishments the name ‘workhouses.’

In order to discourage the lazy and feckless from wishing to reside in these establishments and perceiving the state as a soft touch, it’s vital that these new forms of accommodation for the poor should be seen as a final resort rather than an easy option. And that they should not resemble the genuine homes that their residents – or, as they will now be known, ‘inmates’ - could earn through legitimate work.

For this reason, I would recommend that the new ‘workhouses’ are free of unnecessary luxuries such as television, carpeting, central heating or privacy. Large dormitories could easily be inhabited by up to twenty or thirty people, through the provision of narrow parallel mattresses arranged close to one another on the floor.

I would also give serious thought to whether hot water is also an unnecessary luxury. I feel that, as many conservative commentators have said previously, we urgently need to readdress our definitions of ‘poverty’ and ‘deprivation.’ In many nations round the world, running water of any description is perceived as a luxury; a roof over one’s head and a body mass index in excess of 15 is surely enough for any reasonable being.

In terms of food, fare will be simple but nutritious, and will largely consist of gruel. With one bowl a day per person, the obesity crisis facing the underclass will be resolved at a single stroke.

Since men and women will be housed in separate establishments, birth rates among the less desirable elements of society will plummet – another beneficial side-effect of my proposal. However, where pregnancy does occur, the baby should be removed from its mother at birth - as early as possible, to minimise any potential emotional trauma – and, where possible, given to a more suitable and deserving family who are able to house and educate it privately.

For those children who cannot be rehomed, I propose eliminating the pointless expense of state education by dismantling state schools and replacing them with more useful apprenticeships. From an early age – six, let’s say – they can be sent out to assist respectable local businesspeople. This will enable them to learn a useful trade and begin a lucrative future in highly sought-after professions – such as chimney sweep or undertaker’s assistant – which offer excellent prospects for future self-betterment.

A further brilliant aspect of my proposal is this; far from the soul-sapping nanny-state-sponsored lethargy of the current system, where recipients of state charity are encouraged to sit around unprofitably watching television and wasting their skills, they would be strongly - nay forcibly - encouraged to work in the new ‘workhouses.’ In this way, they would enjoy the self-respect, fulfilment and satisfaction of practising a useful and valuable trade for fourteen or fifteen hours each day, such as picking oakum or breaking rocks.

All healthcare and funding, as far as possible, should be provided by individual charity – which, as every good conservative knows, is infinitely preferable to the lumbering, inefficient behemoth of the state. At a stroke, this approach to socio-economic deprivation demolishes the costly and ineffective mechanisms of social services. Why should we waste billions on an army of overtrained and overqualified professionals to judge individual needs, risks and priorities, when we can simply leave it up to Lady Arabella Fink-Nottle to decide whether she likes the look of you or not after you’ve fallen at her feet and done a little creative begging?

Meanwhile, those who choose to opt out of this caring social safety net - possibly by climbing over the walls or tunnelling out of their cell into the outside world – will be rewarded by a society committed to encouraging and rewarding self-reliance, private endeavour and entrepreneurialism. Street prostitution and pickpocketing are but two of the dynamic professional options open to these fortunate pioneers in my brave new world.

I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, by providing for infants, relieving the poor, and removing the financial burdens of unnecessary taxation from the rich. I don’t even live in a council house, so won’t benefit from this scheme in the slightest.

The End

(Apologies to Jonathan Swift. Damn, I hate this government.)

J x

Mother Fuckers

2010-08-11T13:21:00.004+01:00

Okay. Before I start talking about this story, a quick disclaimer.

Because I know what so many people – my own crowd, my own readers – are going to be saying about it. Even my ex-boyfriend (the one I actually cared about, not the old liver-spotted one – although he’s going to be on the same page too, come to think of it).

The general mood is probably along the lines of ‘well, not before time. Serve ‘em right.’

And I’m probably about to lose a lot of friends here.

In fact it’s a damned good job I’m not with my ex any more, because if we hadn’t broken up already, we would have broken up in a huge blazing row over this issue. We’re not just on different pages here – we’re not even in the same bloody library.

The weird thing is - since I don’t have a dog in this particular fight, I shouldn’t give a shit.

In fact, logically, I should be on the other side of the debate, as women with families are always smugly prioritised over us nasty selfish childless types who can’t see the selflessness or the logic of relentless procreation – I mean Christ, it’s not like the world urgently needs more people, or the human race is going to face extinction if we don’t all do our duty and pop out a few sprogs. If anything, there’s way too fucking many of us and the breeders should give it a break while there’s still room on this planet to fart.

So for selfish reasons, I should be schadenfreudishly glad. I’ve got no kids, so I don’t give a rat’s arse. Kiss it.

But the thing is that single mothers really don’t deserve all this grief. For every stereotypical Vicky Pollard, there’s a perfectly normal, intelligent, educated woman who had no more intention of being that demonised creature a single mother (boo, hiss) than the young Simon Weston had of becoming the poster boy for burns victims. Sometimes, shit just happens. And some people don’t understand this. Largely because no real shit has happened to them or theirs yet, and they still think in terms of you-deserved-it cause and effect.

(Perhaps this is wrong of me, but I always secretly hope for this to change when I meet people who think like that. I always hope for something to happen to them that they weren’t expecting or bargaining for. Something that takes their cool smug certainty that anyone in a tough situation only has their silly selves to blame for being an alcoholic or a rough sleeper or a single mum, and smashes this certainty into an unrecognisable pulp. Except when it’s someone I’m going out with, when I obviously want the best for them and have decidedly mixed emotions on the subject. But I digress. Back to the point.)

Unfortunately, and what the haters don’t take into account, is that - behind a large majority of single mothers - there’s a complete prick of a husband or boyfriend.

Who takes to responsibility like a cat to water, fucks off without a second thought for the ex left behind to try and cope on her own or the child left to grow up without a father - and trying to track him down to make him pay maintenance or share childcare responsibilities is like nailing jelly to the wall.

Of course, it’s always easier and more fun to blame the woman. Obviously the yo-yo knickered slags should have used their psychic gifts to detect their other half’s carefully-concealed true nature – and sensed his innate selfish uselessness a good nine months before he understood it himself. They should have closed their eyes, communed with the spirits, and tuned into the spookily clear mental image of him fucking off without a forwarding address while the kid was still in nappies. If you don’t go investing in that crystal ball when you miss your first period, missy, you’ve got only yourself to blame.

But it genuinely upsets me to think of the reality of these proposed changes, and their clear implications. The second the kid hits five - absolutely nowhere near old enough to fend for themselves, or to cope on their own if the prohibitively expensive childcare arrangements fall through unexpectedly - their one and only carer is forced out to look for work.

You’ll be penalised by a reduction in your already overstretched benefits if you can’t find work, even if the reason why you can’t find it is because it doesn’t exist. The hectoring old Tory theory of ‘get on your bike’ no longer applies, unless you’re capable of cycling all the way to India - and once there, living on about three pounds fifty a week. Outsourcing is a wonderful thing.

Then, even if you magically do manage to find work - and finding work in today’s Britain makes finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq look like a piece of piss – you’re unceremoniously chucked off benefits and onto the financial mercy of your new employers. And, with the state wielding its usual blunt instrument where a scalpel would be more useful, all housing benefit stops as well.

And your kids are off to full-time daycare at the ripe old age of five. And you’ll have to send those kids anywhere you can afford that’ll have them all day. If you don’t like the look of the facilities or the location’s not convenient, tough shit.

And then, it’s all dependent on you holding down that job, as a single mother with dependent pre-school-aged children. Who have a notoriously annoying tendency to get things like measles and mumps and nonspecific sniffly ailments, necessitating their presence in bed at home and your presence there with them.

Now, the million-dollar question. How many employers aren’t going to mind you taking a week off when one kid comes down with the lurgey – then another week off when the other kid follows suit straight after, and then an additional two weeks off when you come down with it yourself? Or mind you constantly coming in late? Or having to leave early?

How many employers aren’t going to get pissed off with this sort of thing extremely quickly, hand you your P45 and put you straight back in the benefits queue?

And here’s something a good 99% of the single-mum-haters are fortunate enough not to know.

The administrative mechanics of coming off benefits and then going back on them makes turning an oil tanker round in a puddle look like performing a three-point turn in a Mini Cooper.

Which, for people with nothing in the way of savings and dependent kids to single-handedly worry about, is no laughing matter.

It not only means no income and spending money, which is bad enough all on its own. If you get a job and then lose it because of your childcare issues, you could also be talking upwards of two months with no housing benefit.

And you’ll get evicted for this.

So what’s going to happen in reality, as from October next year? Getting out my own crystal ball, I see more homelessness, uncertainty, anxiety, disruption and despair ahead for some of the most vulnerable and unfairly demonised people in today’s society. More single-parent families trapped in the cramped dehumanising desperation of B and Bs, or living on the precarious, fraying charity of family friends. More bewildered, frightened kids finding their mum crying in the kitchen every morning and not knowing why the landlord’s chucking them out.

While that glib smug baby-new-potato-faced wanker who I hate more and more intensely with every passing day is on the telly smirking beside his fragrant wife and charming children. Burbling on complacently about family values and difficult choices** and all of us being in the same boat.

Ah, but we have to cut costs somewhere, I hear you say. Where’s the money coming from to look after these women and their kids?

Well, I’m the first to put my hand in the air and own up to the fact that I’m no economist. But I’m guessing it could come from the same place the money comes from to fight pointless, unwinnable wars that benefit nobody but the greedy, incompetent fuckers sending nineteen year old boys off to come home with a few less limbs than they started out with.

And the same place they find the money to bankroll the useless and outdated Royal Family, who have about eleven passionate fans in the entire country - none of whom should go starting any long books.

And the same place they found the money to bail out the greedy banking bastards who are so far up the politicians’* arses, they’re in danger of emerging from their left nostril at any second (Their debts belonged to the whole nation? Their billion-pound recent profits don’t. Funny, that.)

You’re supposed to get more right-wing as you get older, but it looks like I’m going in the opposite direction.

Single-mother-bashing hate mail to the usual address…

J x

*Unlike many, I don’t differentiate between Tory and Labour on this score – and anyone who sees it as top-hatted toffs versus socialist workers needs to wake the fuck up and remember that idealistic left-wing icon Tony Blair with his idealistic left-wing lifestyle of sunbathing on yachts and sponging off billionaire bum-chums and building a property empire that would put the Duke of Westminster to shame. Not to mention that other idealistic left-wing icon John Prescott, with his idealistic left-wing lifestyle of croquet and Jaguars and great big fuck-off country mansions and shagging the staff. Governments are governments, politicians are politicians, and plague-bearing rats are plague-bearing rats - meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If voting changed anything, they wouldn’t let you do it.

**By the way, I do wish they’d stop talking about pain in store for the country. It makes them sound like sado-masochists - and with a track record of sex scandals like theirs, that’s an association they really don’t want. I’m pretty sure it was a Conservative MP found hanging in some wardrobe somewhere back in the day, dressed in stockings and suspenders and with an orange stuffed in his mouth like some Heston-Blumenthal-on-acid version of a suckling pig. If this ever happens to anyone else, my money’s on George Osborne.

An Open Letter To A Total Wanker

2010-08-07T18:36:00.004+01:00

Dear Wanker,

Some time ago, I wrote on here that - with immediate effect - anyone who sent me unpleasant ad hominem attacks would get their shit deleted.

I kept on saying this, then making an exception and printing vicious personal comments anyway. Because I really, really hate deleting comments.

Unfortunately, this has apparently made me the online equivalent of that ineffectual wild-eyed teacher at school who kept on saying 'if you don't stop talking at the back, I'll put the whole class in detention' - and never following through by actually doing it. And we all know what happened to that teacher (spectacular nervous breakdown while crying and shaking in corner of classroom, carted away by anxious colleagues, kids laughing about for next five years.)

This is why your comment to my last post - like any forthcoming venomous personal insults and attacks - got deleted. There comes a point where I simply have to draw a line in the sand, and that line is being drawn here and now.

Having said that, I will never delete any attacks, however violent and sustained, on my thoughts, opinions or ideas.

So if you'd limited yourself to saying that my 'marks that last for one week =OK/marks that last for three weeks = not OK' remark was stupid and made no sense and proved I was totally fucked up, I would have had no problem answering you quite politely.

Saying that these timescales obviously weren't intended to be timed with a frigging stopwatch, and I was simply differentiating between the approximate length of time it takes for minor bruises to fade versus serious welts.

And that it doesn't take a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist to see the difference between a minor blueish bruise on an arse and the whole thing having turned a uniform dark burgundy - and guess at the approximate, not set in stone, provided as a general indication only, timescale that said injuries are going to take to heal.

I would also have pointed out that anyone who wasn't a total fucking retard could have seen this quite clearly for themselves.

I would than have wished you a lovely weekend, and all the very best at the Special Olympics.

But you then had to continue, saying that not only was I still a grade A gold-digger, but it was irrelevant whether I'd dumped Mark or not - because he'd never have been interested in offering me any money or commitment anyway.

Which I must say, I found a little rude.

Also quite disturbing, because it would appear I'm in the presence of psychic powers.

Not even anything as common-or-garden as boring old telepathy - where you have to be physically or emotionally close to the object of your mind-reading skills.

No, your supernatural gift is altogether stranger and more demonic.

Purely by reading a total stranger's written words, you immediately have godlike insight into the minds of everyone else they know - even if you don't know these people from an Adam-shaped hole in the ground.

I can't help feeling bad that you're wasting these superpowers to criticise my humble little blog. Think of the money you could be making by exercising them elsewhere.

Cast your eyes over Harry Potter and feel the voices come.

I'm sure JK Rowling would pay handsomely for the news that her daughter's thinking about getting her tongue pierced.

Equally, I daresay Dan Brown would bung you a few quid for the news that his accountant's embezzled two million pounds of his earnings.

And James Patterson would be a very generous man if you let him know his wife was secretly shagging the Mexican poolboy.

Perhaps, like Johnny Smith from the Dead Zone, you have ethical issues with using your weird powers for mercenary ends - but I can only advise you to think again. You can always donate the money to charity. Starving children round the world will thank you.

Gifts like your own are as much curse as blessing. It must have come as a dreadful burden to the small retarded child you were when you slipped into that coma and awoke with a demonic power that the world had never seen before.

Perhaps this is why you've grown up into such a cunt.

The world of the spirits works in mysterious ways.

Nice to hear from you, anyway.

Mad love,

J x

(PS - previous personally abusive comments got published and answered. This last one got answered but not published. Any forthcoming replies will neither be published nor answered. In the words of Baltimore's finest export Clay Davis, 'crawl, walk, then run.')

(PPS - I'm on holiday for the next week, so new posts are likely to be thin on the ground for a while. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves:-)

The End Of The Affair

2010-08-05T08:33:00.004+01:00

Well, I’ve now officially broken up with Mark.

I kept it real, if diplomatic, saying we were different stages at our lives (which is true) and I needed someone with less baggage and commitments (and liver spots, but I didn’t mention that bit. Told you I was nice in real life.)

So now, I can officially say this – henceforth, anyone who accuses me of being a gold-digger can fuck off.

Because I’ve just dumped the richest guy I’ve ever been out with.

Not just by a bit, either. Take what the guy who I was genuinely in love with and who dumped me was worth financially, multiply it by twenty and you’re still not even close.

Ergo, I hereby have a cast-iron case for the defence versus any fucker who digs up this tired old canard and throws its rotting corpse at me in my c section. I now have my light sabre. My One True Ring. My golden compass.

I don’t just want Mr Rich. I just chucked Mr Seriously Rich.

Bite me, trolls.

Je ne regrette rien, as there’s no other decision I could possibly have come to. During the one and only date we went on since I learned of his true age – lunch only, so no sexual thingies were involved – the merest brush of his hand on mine made my skin feel like a slug that’s just had a shaker full of salt poured over it. And when we kissed with tongues, I felt genuinely nauseous. There was a sort of old taste that I didn’t notice before, or that I simply overlooked while blinded by the breathtaking house and lifestyle. A sort of musty, church-cloakroom-in-the-rain sort of taste. And something weirdly reptilian and scaly about the tongue. Like a small chilly lizard crawling into your mouth.

When you feel like this about a man, it’s not a choice whether you stay or chuck. Unless you’re planning to sneakily inject yourself with pethidine every single time he’s getting ready to shag you, you’ve got no damned option but to cut the cord.

I’ve got no idea how Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends manage – in fact, the Mark experience has given me whole new respect for the dead-eyed skanks. Far from seeing them as vacuous slappers who got lucky, I now perceive the young ladies in question to have the thespian talents of Helen Mirren backed up by the inhumanly strong stomach of Bear Grylls.

From where I stand, there just isn’t that much money in the world.

Or that much booze.

Just to clarify from recent comments - my decision didn’t have anything to do with Don the divine, who I’m convinced is far, far better in fantasy than reality. While I still chance to think of him and what could have been, the merest moment of realistic clear-eyed thought tells me it would never have lasted. He was into this consenting non-consensual thing, where you state your limits at the start, he can do what he likes beyond that, and there are no safe words. Detailed rules and domestic discipline. Not about my pleasure but his alone. Super hot in theory. In practice, about as long-term workable as communism.

Don was also big on anal, and I think that’s gross. (He was into this thing called figging, too. I had to google search it. I kid you not, it’s where you stick a piece of peeled ginger up your partner's arse so it burns them. Exactly how bored its inventor must have been when he first made this discovery, Christ only knows.)

(I dodged a bullet there with Mark, if you’re interested. The anal, not the figging. Despite his own expressed interest in it, I never did it with him, and now never will.

Which is damned good news, because it’s bad enough having the constant knowledge ‘oh my God, I went out with an XX year old’ jumping about in back of my mind.

Having the knowledge ‘oh my God, I lost my anal virginity to an XX year old’ jumping about there too may lead to long-term counselling or committal.)

A sad truth of my life – if I’m purely upfront about what I do and don’t want in bed (and admittedly, I rarely am), I’m too kinky for most of the vanilla folk and too vanilla for most of the kinky folk.

Whenever I've tried to be real with vanilla boyfriends, I've inevitably found myself trying to explain that when it comes to spanking, you really don’t have to do it light and playful – I actually want it to hurt, and I want to beg you to stop and actually mean it. And if it's really, truly, getting way too much for me, that’s why the good lord invented safe words. Do it like it’s real and like you mean it.

The trick is to say this without sounding like a mentally disturbed slapper who’s working through unresolved and intensely creepy childhood-abuse issues, and should hence be avoided like the fucking plague.

I’m not sure I’ve quite nailed it yet.

Still working on that.

Whereas, on one occasion in my life when went out with someone originally and overtly kinky, I had the exact opposite problem – trying to explain that I didn’t want heavy pain or longlasting marks without sounding like a complete wimp.

To clarify, in case it sounds like I keep moving the goalposts here – I honestly don’t. I consistently don’t want the sort of marks that are visible three weeks later. A week or so, okay. I can handle a week or so. That’s actually quite hot. But that’s also my absolute cutoff limit. Bruises, soreness and mild to moderate pain – yes. Serious cuts, deep welts and genuine agony - no.

And no serious, restraining, couldn’t-get-out-in-an-emergency bondage till I know you really, really well. Like ‘going out together for three months or more’ type well.

And the idea of someone pissing in my mouth makes my stomach turn. And fisting is quite simply the most vile, unsexy, repulsive-sounding thing I can imagine – with the single exception of ATM. And anything with knives or needles or electricity or asphyxiation can fuck off. And anything involving crawling round the floer naked eating dog food and suchlike can fuck off right along with it. As for threesomes and gang bangs, forget it - I’m a one-man woman, and as bi-incurious as it’s possible to get.

And photographs and videos are a no-no so immense they’ve been upgraded to a no no no no no. From where I stand, there’s way too much risk of this sort of thing mysteriously turning up on Youtube when I decide you’re too weird for me and break things off.

I don’t do anal, either.

Apart from that, I’ve got no limits at all. None whatsoever. I'm a sadist's dream.

There must be other people like me out there, surely.

More happy (small to) mediums.

But I genuinely doubt it. For example, whenever I’ve read literotica – even though its stories are specifically separated into categories, and I’m specifically on the category that reflects my own interests – it’s pretty much impossible to find anything that isn’t weaker than a Wetherspoons cocktail. You start reading one that’s got a title like Bound to Serve, and you get something like,

'Elizabeth shivered as her boyfriend wrapped his strong, protective yet masterful arms around her, gazing deep into her soul with his dark green eyes. ‘You look so beautiful tonight, my little slave,' he told her in his deep masculine voice. 'I cherish the gift of your sweet submission. Now, you know I will never truly hurt you and I love you very much, but I’m going to tie you up and whip you tonight because I know it's what you want…'

The fuck is this shit, Maeve Binchy?

So then I go on the more hard core BDSM library. Find some story that's off to a good start. So we’ve got the helpless terrified female captive, the darkly sexy and mysterious master who doesn’t go and ruin things by talking like a particularly cosy-sweatered and uxorious boyfriend on Valentine's day – but doesn’t go to the opposite end of the verbal spectrum either, because that’s just upsetting and I can’t think of any girl in the history of mankind who’s going to find being called fat or ugly a turn on – and the remote dungeon setting. Yeah this is working, that's what I'm talking about – and the girl's cruel yet darkly sexual tormentor turns away with a sadistic gleam in his cold dark eyes, goes to a nearby cupboard and extracts...

Oh, for the love of God and all the saints. A fucking nail gun.

Is there anyone writing this shit whose creative muse isn’t being inspired by either Cecelia Ahern or Ted Bundy?

More alarmingly, am I the only one reading it who doesn’t fantasise about either being cuddled or crucified?

J x

Smells Like Team Spirit

2010-08-04T12:42:00.001+01:00

A very long time ago, when I was about eleven or twelve, my school was playing another school in the finals of some big national hockey tournament. Of course, I wasn’t playing myself – there was more chance of Helen Keller getting capped for the squad - but at the time, it was a very, very big deal. School spirit and jingoism spread like wildfire. On the eve of the match, I found myself gripped with a genuine tension regarding the outcome.

Then, a treacherous little thought occurred to me.

‘Why, precisely, am I rooting for this school?

‘The team that’s allegedly carrying all our hopes and dreams on their shoulders consists of the most poisonous little bullying slags on the face of this planet. There’s not a single, solitary one of these young ladies who wouldn’t make my day, my month and my year by getting tortured to death by a paedophile.

‘And as for ninety per cent of the other people cheering for them – more of the same.

‘The only way the other guys can possibly be any worse than these despicable little bitches is if they’re some sort of terrorist training camp offering extra-curricular activities in microwaving small fluffy animals and making lampshades out of human skin.

‘And even then, it’s going to be a close-run thing.’

And hey presto, I suddenly didn’t give a tin shit if the other team smashed us into historic oblivion.

This was a true road-to-Damascus moment that’s stayed with me ever since, preventing me from ever getting swept up in big sweeping group loyalties. Most recently, during the World Cup. When my innermost soul threatened to get involved in it all following our match versus Germany, I found myself faced with a simple question.

Could I really – if only for ninety minutes – share the entirety of my hopes, fears and dreams with literally every other fucker I knew? Including that arrogant blonde cow in the gym, my loathsome snake of an ex-boss and that spotty little twat in Dixons who sold me the wrong sort of printer?

Could I? Could I really?

And I found myself reminded of this sentiment by a recent article in the Guardian.

We are one, sisters! We all suffer, dream and triumph together! The pain of one is the pain of us all! Our experience is shared and universal!

To quote the immortal Jim Royle, my arse.

Big sweeping dogmatic group loyalties piss me off. The tiniest thimbleful of common sense or rational thought will tell you that, for every co-member of this big sweeping group you have any fellow-feeling or affection for, there’s a veritable shitload of other co-members who sincerely and genuinely deserve to die.

‘Them and us’ only works when you’re convinced that ‘us’ are fundamentally superior.

When you realize that at least half of ‘us’ are every bit as contemptible as any of ‘them’ could ever dream of being, it makes a bit of a mockery of the whole thing.

And this is why I can’t ever get that het up about women’s issues, or women’s sufferings en masse. Some women are fucking horrible. Some women are fucking stupid. Some women are fucking both.

I can’t feel any solidarity towards (for the sake of purest example) the relentlessly earnest po-faced politically-correct can’t-write-for-toffee pain-in-the-arse Guardian columnist Bidisha, just because - like me and half the sodding planet - she happened to be born with a fanny.

In fact, I dislike plenty of women as fervently as the most rabid misogynist could ever dream of doing.

Is this wrong of me?

J x

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

2010-08-02T13:55:00.001+01:00

Well, on the prospect of finishing with Mark – I was away this weekend, we’re supposed to be seeing each other this week. I’m going to have to break it off with him before this happens - I think over the phone would be best. Just to prevent a horrible awkward scene doing it in person round his house and then having to leave.

Ironically, if I was the woman some of you seem to think I am, I’d be clinging on to Mark like grim death.

Because, at the risk of denting the fourth wall again – oh, sod it, this isn’t giving anything away – he’s in an entirely different financial league from anyone else I’ve ever been out with.

But that age gap is just too much. Judging by the comments, your general estimate is more conservative than Maggie Thatcher.

If I told you the real numbers, you’d think I was taking the piss.

My tolerance to huge age gaps and funny looks from people in restaurants etc is far, far higher than that of any other woman I know… but this is a step too far even for me.

He also has more baggage than Heathrow Airport, with more exes and children than any sensible human being should amass in the course of three lifetimes. Without the age gap, this would be tiresome, but not such a big deal. On top of the age gap, however, forget it.

I think that he thinks that the £££££ makes up for everything else – and I can sort of see why he’d think that, because he’s as rich as fuck.

But huge as the pros are, the cons are even bigger.

I find myself noticing things I didn’t notice before – the liver spots on the back of the hands that I attributed to sun damage, a certain papery dryness to the skin – and wanting to slap myself on the forehead like Homer Simpson for not noticing these extra 15 years before. And I’m now paranoically sure that, if anyone else I know saw him, they’d guess his real age right away.

Far from my relationship with him feeling like any sort of status symbol, I’m now appalled at the very prospect of absolutely anyone I know finding out I’ve been seeing him at all. That age gap’s fucking embarrassing. It makes me look like a Happy Shopper version of Anna Nicole Smith.

I can’t even face sleeping with him ever again. Now I know his real age, the very idea makes my flesh shrivel up. I keep thinking ‘oh my God, I shagged a XX-year-old’ and cringing inside - and that can’t be good.

Only thing is, I hate breaking up with people. In a way, I prefer it when people break up with me. It’s not nice getting dumped, but at least I know, with absolute cast-iron certainty, that I’m not going to turn nasty… no matter how privately devastated I am, I’ll take the news with perfect outward composure and lack of recriminations, then walk away without a backward glance or another word. And I can’t know this with any degree of sureness about anyone else.

Oh well. Needs must.

Guess I’m just going to have to bite the bullet and do it…

J x

Age Concern

2010-07-29T13:39:00.002+01:00

Oh God.

I feel like I've opened Pandora's Box and a whole load of horrible little flying thingies have swarmed out.

All has been good between me and Mark since I last spoke of him.

Then I was idly googling his name the other day, and came across an interview with him in a publication that shall remain nameless.

All good?

Well. Sort of.

Except for the fact that it quoted his real age.

Now, you know I said a while back that he was quite a lot older than me?

I consider it extremely rude to ask people outright 'how old are you?' (if only he, and people generally, demonstrated the same restraint with me) - so I assumed a rough ball-park figure from his kids' ages and his general physical appearance (own teeth, own hair, good shape generally, no deaf aid etc etc etc).

It now appears that he had the kids in question rather later in life than I was assuming.

He's FIFTEEN SODDING YEARS OLDER than the absolute oldest age I had in mind.

I mean, I know I go for older men, but this is taking the piss. We're now talking about the sort of age gap that could get my story bought by 'Closer.'

I tell myself that nothing whatsoever has changed, and he's still exactly the same person he was before. And I'm being a tad hypocritical, as I've sometimes thought, when reading The Site That Must Not Be Named, that one of its most ridiculous and creepy aspects is its bizarre obsession with exact women's ages - whereby 'youth' is perceived as a judging category all on its own, and takes unquestioned precedence over actual looks. So that, in the eyes of any self-respecting PUA, a 19 year old who looked 40 would be considered a better and more desirable catch than a 40 year old who looked 19.

My unspoken eye-rolling reaction to these profoundly confused and troubled gentlemen has always been - 'if she looks and acts like she's XX years old, what the holy hell does it matter if she's actually X years older? The only possible reason why it would matter is if your main priority is having kids - and for most of you guys, getting your lady pregnant is about as much of a priority as having your dick chopped off with a rusty scalpel. Conclusion = you people are pathologically obsessed by impressing your idiot friends with meaningless numbers. Seek help.'

Yet - upset as I'd be if I got someone who was crazy about me thinking I was 27, then instantly and illogically lost interest upon discovering that I'm the wrong side of 30 - I can't sodding help doing much the same thing regarding Mark.

Although upon reflection, I'm doing myself a serious disservice by comparing myself to these obsessive borderline-Aspergers PUA freaks and their endless neurotic dissection of the sexual market value of 25 year old women versus 26 year old women. If I'd thought Mark was 38 and it turned out he was 42, I wouldn't give a tin shit.

But fifteen years older than I imagined - when I imagined that he was pretty damn old in the first place??????????????????

I feel a bit like I ate a pork pie from a service station, and it tasted perfectly all right, and no health complications ensued.

And then a few days later, I found a wrapper in the bin saying 'consume before end of August 1997.'

This relationship cannot go on.

J x

Hello, Strangers

2010-07-27T13:00:00.002+01:00

God, I wish I could write fully about myself on here. Just to give you some idea of what I'm actually like.

Recent comments have been downright traumatic.

I mean, I always knew I come over different on here than how I actually am IRL. That's a given. Guilty as charged.

But that different?

Fuck me.

Apparently I should write this thing as a novel, because it's clearly coming across as creative fiction.

The idea of living in some big draughty country pile as Lady Wankfordshire, married to someone called Giles or Crispian, and entertaining a houseful of Sebastians and Aramintas every weekend - far from being my wildest dream, it's pretty much my definition of hell on earth, and fuck the money. I hate the English countryside almost as much as I hate the kind of braying chinless twats who appear in Tatler. Old money bores the tits off me. And as far as I'm concerned, anything on four legs that isn't a cat can go and fuck itself.

Yet it turns out this is what some of my readers think I want, and I'm just aghast that I've managed to portray myself so staggeringly misleadingly.

I would dearly, deeply love to surprise the shit out of you by revealing exactly what Mark's like (absolutely nothing like you probably think, if you're imagining some sneering Alan-Clark-tastic lord of the manor cynically taking advantage of the wide-eyed little wannabe prior to marrying his second cousin Lady Penelope - as evidenced by the fact that his ex was significantly poorer, chavvier and less horsey than me, as well as being nearly 10 years my senior.)

And I'd love to surprise you even more by telling you exactly what my last serious ex was like before Mark. Those people who seem to see me as some hothouse hybrid of Heather Mills McCartney and a special needs child would have to eat their words in grand style at this point - without salt and pepper.

Trouble is, if I do that, I'm going to have to reveal personal details from which both I, and the men in question, could conceivably be recognised by random lurkers who know us IRL. It's this damned fourth wall again. Sharing tell-tale little personal details such as specific jobs, marital histories, exact ages, life stories etc etc is like coming up to that fourth wall with a sledgehammer and starting to smash the living shit out of it.

If anyone's ever written a blog of their own and had any concern for privacy and basic common sense at all, they'll realise that a whole lot of the crucial details inevitably need to be left out.

And these, unfortunately, are the exact same details of which three-dimensional characters and motivations are made.

So I'm stuck. Totally, completely and utterly.

I have no option but to leave huge blank yawning spaces in my narrative, which - it would appear - some of you good people are quite unconsciously filling up with pure fiction. I'd like to tell you to stop, but I can't, because I've got nothing to replace your fiction with apart from fresh air.

All I can really do at this point is to paraphrase the Arctic Monkeys.

Whatever you think I am, that's what I'm not.

J x

Tory Boys 2 : Mr Right

2010-07-26T12:29:00.001+01:00

In the spirit of scientific enquiry, I find myself further musing on what invisible forces underlie the 'Tory ex' thing.

Whether it's them (they're approaching me) or me (I'm choosing them.)

Because there's something going on here, for sure. I mean, by the law of averages, you'd expect a politically-neutral lady such as my good self to have a couple of lefties or liberals in the ex files.
And it can't be that the Tories are the only ones who go for me as they see something in me that their left-wing friends don't.

Because I really don't buy into this 'thinking man's crumpet' style belief that men go for different physical things in a woman according to their own social group, intellect level, personal beliefs and character.

A normal red-blooded Labour man isn't going to be attracted or repelled by different visual indicators to a normal red-blooded Tory man. Or, for that matter, a normal red-blooded neo nazi, or a normal red-blooded rabid Marxist. Or a normal red-blooded Cambridge don, or a normal red-blooded teenage Baltimore drug-dealer. This shit is universal.

Ask Arthur Miller.

QED, I'd be equally as immediately attractive or as immediately unattractive to a random cross-section of men scattered across the political rainbow.

So by that rule, you'd assume I'd be approached by equal numbers of Tories, Lefties, liberals, name it.

But experience tells me for damn sure that this is not the case. I'm not rejecting all the Guardianistos. I just don't get them in the first place.

Although having said that, you generally don't seem to find out someone's politics till at least the second or third date - and the exceptions tend to be a rare and memorable nightmare.

For the sake of example - back in the day, I once knew a gentleman named Keith. We first encountered one another when I was seventeen and he was thirty. He had a (comparatively) good job and a (comparatively) foxy car and a (comparatively) suave demeanour, although if you lived in my home town this shit wasn't hard, because Frank off Shameless would look a bit Rhett Butler-tastic compared to most of the other blokes round the 'hood.

If That Site had been around back then, Keith would have been a true and devoted follower of He Who Must Not Be Named - the steadfast Peter to the Dark Lord's beatific Messiah. Keith had the full royal flush of PUA/MRA qualities. Obnoxious, sexist, conceited, ass-ugly - bearing a startling resemblance to a freshly boiled piglet - and insanely, deludedly convinced he had a chance with a lissom ultra-popular babe nearly fifteen years his junior.

The lissom ultra-popular babe in question was not me, I hasten to add.

He orginally wanted my best friend. I don't know why she was my best friend, because I fucking hated her.

Funny old world.

She worked in a supermarket on weekends, where he met her. He sent her a huge bunch of flowers at work asking her to go out with him and everything. She told him to fuck off. There's a message here for all of you gentlemen, if you care to heed it. Avoid total bitches who are way out of your league anyway. It's not rocket science.

I was almost sick with jealousy, as I would have happily sold my granny at a car boot sale for a suave older boyfriend with a good job and a foxy car who sent me huge bunches of flowers at work. All the creepy-borderline-paedo, PUA-esque, boiled-piglet stuff has only come to me with the benefit of adult maturity, wisdom and hindsight. At the time, I thought he was the shiza.

However, while he knew I fancied him, he wouldn't have given me the time of day.

Which kind of calls the beliefs of the Personality Uber Alles crowd into very serious doubts.

As I was and remain about a thousand times nicer and less conceited than the young lady in question (not fucking hard) and also about a thousand times brighter (again, no great lifetime achievement - this is me and pretty much everyone else on earth who doesn't live in a special home for retarded kids.)

The list of special qualities she had that I didn't were short and simple - 'five foot eleven and blonde.'

Well, I got him eventually - if only for a date.

Because while I was never destined to be five foot eleven or blonde, I lost a load of weight between the ages of seventeen and eighteen - going down from a size sixteen to a size eight. Which just goes to show that hard work pays off, and all that self-denial wasn't a complete waste of time and energy. Owing to my sterling back-breaking efforts and unflinching self-control for the best part of twelve fucking months, I finally managed to get a date with a man my best mate wouldn't have given the time of day to and who looked like a freshly boiled piglet.

Woo fucking hoo.

Someone ought to make an inspirational against-all-odds Hollywood movie about this story. There wouldn't be a dry eye in the house.

I'm copyrighting the title The Pursuit of Crappyness.

Anyway, on our first date, he turned out to have - in addition to the foxy car and the suave-and-worldly-if-you're-an-extremely-naive-small-town-raised-seventeen-year-old virgin demeanour - quite possibly the most breathtaking political opinions I've ever encountered. I'm not talking defending Maggie Thatcher here. I'm talking defending Hitler.

You probably think I'm exaggerating this for the sake of a better story.

I'm not.

He also hated homeless people. I mean he really, really hated homeless people. He said that something he often did to homeless people was to give them a brick lying around nearby, and - when they asked what it was for - he'd say 'it's a contribution towards your new house.'

Some thirteen years later, I still don't know whether he was kidding or not.

Whether he was an avant-garde forerunner to Frankie Boyle - a fearless proponent of un-politically correct post-modernistic humour. Making breathtakingly outrageous, poker-faced, 'did he really just say that?' statements with the deliberate intention of flabbergasting his audience.

Or whether he was, as I suspected at the time, simply a cunt.

If the latter, I still hope to this very day that he fucked with the wrong care-in-the community tramp one bright sunny morning, and got his brick returned to him. In the face. At great force.

I know Sylvia Plath said 'every woman adores a fascist' - but you know, let's not get carried away here.

There's fantasy and there's reality, and ne'er the twain shall meet.

Anyway, the thing about Sylvia Plath fantasy fascists is that they tend not to look like freshly boiled piglets.

Albeit ones with foxy cars.

Now, that's a right-wing step too far even for me.

Yet maybe a lesser degree of right-wing-ism does tend to travel in tandem with hot male qualities. Because when you come to think of it, the qualities that denote a sincere left-winger - earnestness, selflessness, piousness, feminism, pacifism, vegetarianism, environmentalism, socks-and-sandals-ism - are pretty much the exact same qualities that make a man look like a nerdy, sexless wimp.

So maybe the left-wing guys are approaching me, and I'm deciding they're boring tossers and avoiding them like the plague. And not directly relating this to their political opinions, as I don't even know what these opinions are yet.

For a vivid example of what I'm talking about, look at the likely politics of some major fictional romantic heroes.

I mean, take Heathcliff. If he'd ever voted in between stomping about on the moors with a pack of wild dogs and smashing his head against trees and screaming at invisible ghosts and tearing at graves with his bare hands like a wild animal and winning Which Psycho magazine's Hottie of the Year award for a record-breaking tenth year running, it's a pretty safe bet that he wouldn't have put his cross against the nice lady in the hand-knitted sweater campaigning for human rights, affordable housing and dolphin-friendly tuna.

Or Mr Darcy. Personally, I think he's shockingly overrated as a sex symbol and a romantic hero - he's just a boring stuck-up twat with a shitload of money, which may well get you on Tatler's
Most Eligible list in cynical and depressing real life, but isn't exactly the stuff of romantic fairytales*. I mean, look at the snooty little fucker. He's basically George Osborne in fancy dress. But the fact remains that he's still widely recognised as a sex symbol, and again - on polling day - another one who's unlikely to have voted for the candidate campaigning under the slogal Social Justice And Equality For All.

Or Mr Rochester off Jane Eyre. Or the unambiguously super-hot Max de Winter off Rebecca. If anyone had rocked up at Thornfield or Manderley with a manifesto for liberal reform and bunny-hugging, they'd probably have left at great speed and with a few less teeth than they'd turned up with.

Or Jilly Cooper's finest creation, Rupert Campbell-Black - now that's one serious sex symbol, at least in Riders and Rivals before he settled down with Taggie and got all boring. And I haven't even got to guess at his politics, because in Rivals he quit show jumping to become a Tory MP.
Edward Cullen might be a political liberal, perhaps, but you already know what I think about that whiny emo streak of piss. if he'd turned up at my school when I was a teenager, the local hard lads would have thought he was a goth and beat him up.

In short, the vast mass of romantic fiction seems to be backing me up here.

Or are there a load of liberally-minded hot heroes who I just can't think of right now?

J x

*Apart, of course, from that old Grimm Brothers classic The Princess And The Boring Stuck Up Twat With A Shitload Of Money. Disney really missed a trick not making that one.

Tory Boys

2010-07-20T13:03:00.001+01:00

A sudden thought has occurred to me, following my recent discovery that Mark is a Tory donor. This is a bit like finding out that your boyfriend is a registered nonce, only scarier.

Why have all my serious ex-boyfriends been Tories?

I mean, they've got nothing else in common. Absolutely bugger all. They range in ages from 28 (I was 18 at the time) to - fuck, I'm not even going to tell you. A fair old bit older than 28, put it that way.

They range in cultures from Sikh to C of E.

In grooming from 'spent longer getting ready than me' to 'washed hair with bar of soap.'

In looks from (um, actually this is another thing they all had in common. On a list of my serious exes, Greek gods are notable by their absence... when I read problem pages where women wail 'I get so jealous when other women keep staring at my man and saying how hot he is,' my instinctive emotional response is along the lines of 'well you poor, poor little darling. My heart pumps purple piss for you.')

But otherwise, they've all been as different from one another as night from day.

But all Tories, and why is this? I'm not a Tory. I'm sort of centre-centre-centre. Pretty much where Charlie Brooker is on the political compass. And David Mitchell (the Guardian/Peep Show one, not the Cloud Atlas one.) Adhering to a sort of basic philosophy that politicians are all per se lying tossers, but it would be nice to have a lying tosser in power for once who wasn't actively evil. What the hell, you've got to have a dream.

And lest some smartarse in the audience says it's because Tories are rich - which criticism, I may tell you, is getting pretty fucking old, as well as totally inaccurate (my exes all had jobs, but we're not exactly talking Paul McCartney here)- you're barking up the wrong tree. Contrary to popular opinion, the link between 'rich' and 'votes Tory' is at least as tenuous as the link between 'rich' and 'owns an Elton John CD.'

A veritable shitload of rich people wouldn't dream of voting Tory any more than they'd dream of moving out of Islington, or eating a non-organic kumquat, or acknowledging what a mind-bogglingly hypocritical tosser they are. (I met some of these guys back in the day, come to think of it. But I've told you about them already.)

Equally, plenty of devout Tory voters do indeed live on huge sprawling estates which have housed their families for untold generations, where the concept of paid employment is regarded with a dismissively raised eyebrow, where recreational shooting is a popular pastime, and where young male children are taken away from home at an early age to live in bleak institutions characterised by limited freedom, rigid discipline and homo-erotic violence.

The estates in question are called things like 'Nelson Mandela'.

It's never occurred to me that there's any conscious choice or volition behind this Tory-ex thing at all, but I guess, even on a subconscious level, there must be something spooky going on. Random coincidence alone doesn't explain it.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to have one serious ex who is a Tory may be regarded as a misfortune.

To have six of the fuckers in a row looks like carelessness.

J x

Game On

2010-07-14T11:31:00.001+01:00

Following a couple of recent comments, I thought I'd clarify my position about bad boys and Game. I don't know what's happened this week. I'm being haunted by the ghost of Game. If some tall skinny guy wearing black nail varnish and a floppy hat comes up to me on the train home, asks me if I saw that catfight outisde the station, then tells me my nose crinkles up and looks weird when I smile, I'll know there's something spooky going on.

Personally, I've never, ever, ever been interested in bad boys - not when I was eighteen, not when I was 22 and not now. Throughout my life, my views on the matter all boil down to a simple statement. 'If you don't like me enough to ring me on time, pick me up on time, stay away from other women and spend a bit of time and money reassuring me you're not just after one thing - I don't like you enough to fuck you. Go find some other girl dumb enough to put up with your bullshit.'

This isn't because I'm confident or conceited. Quite the opposite.

It's as if I'm broadcasting on an insecurity frequency so high, the PUAosphere can't hear me.

As for the 'adoring alpha males' thing, this is entirely alien to me - never have, never will. Show me a tall handsome effortlessly confident man arrogantly holding court to a group of adoring mini-me males and Pussycat Doll-looking females, and I'll make three immediate on-the-spot assumptions about the gentleman in question : 1 - epic wanker, 2 - wouldn't give me the time of day, 3 - I couldn't give a shit anyway.

If my type could be defined in any way, and I'm highly suspicious of people who go for 'types' too exclusively - people aren't Barbie dolls to buy in boxes marked 'bubbly blonde' or 'sporty executive' - it would be 'quietly humorous cerebral loner who dislikes big noisy parties as much as I do, hates sports as much as I do, hated school as much as I did, and is never happier than when having a late-night wine-fuelled conversation about life, the universe and everything with a single other person who's perfectly on their wavelength.'

Well, I mean he'd obviously probably be happier getting a blow job - he's only human, after all - but I'm talking clothed activities here.

This is pretty much the direct antithesis of 'alpha male', who I'd define as 'that vain obnoxious bird-brained cock who captained the rugby team back at school and whose Daddy got him a cushy job in the City when he graduated with a third in a subject a trained monkey could have got a 2.1 in.'

In America, I believe they call this sort of fellow a 'frat boy'

The word 'cunt,' however, is happily universal.

Anyway, the alpha male type is about as alluring to me as a round-the-clock Twilight movie marathon. God I hate Twilight. Just shag him already, you frigid emo bint. You never know, it might make that mopey streak of piss smile for once in his hundred-year-old undead life.

To put it another way, I'm so far removed from the archetypal female likes and dislikes, I can sort of watch this Game malarkey from a distance. A bit like I'd watch the activities of Nigerian scam artists trying to con people out of their life savings by claiming to be the exiled crown prince of Ruritania needing somewhere to store the embezzled family billions. Or like I'd watch unqualified Prague-based cosmetic surgeons offering boob jobs for seven hundred pounds, and if you book today we'll throw in a free nose job and a bottle of Pinot Grigiot.

On one hand, their activities are morally reprehensible and make you despair for the ultimate future of humanity.

On the other hand, it's all darkly, entertainingly theoretical from my perspective, as I've never been daft enough to fall for any of their bullshit - and I'm a hundred per cent, bet-my-bank-account-on-it certain that I never will.

And I can't help having a distinct feeling of 'caveat fucking emptor.'

Because, like the wotsit-coloured ladies with the inch-long French manicures who come back from Scalpels 'R' Us with four misshapen boobs welded onto their lower back - and say in between racking sobs on Watchdog that maybe they should have suspected something when they saw that the surgeon reeked of brandy and had three fingers on one hand - when it comes to the women who fall for the negs and the mind games and the manipulative PUA douche's personal armoury of emotional push-and-pull techniques, you really have to roll your eyes and say 'well, duh.'

Furthermore, the sort of women who fall for Game are the exact sort of women who friendzone decent guys who treat them right, treat respectful gentlemanly suitors like crap, and inevitably gravitate towards the biggest asshole in the room with the eerie precision of guided missiles.

These woman are invariably, in my experience, total, absolute, uncategorical bitches - and deserve whatever the hell they get.

Looked at like this, the Game dicks are doing the rest of humanity a favour, dragging the biggest bitches into a sectioned-off corner of the dating pool where they can all piss away to their little hearts' content.

Because, if Mr Manipulative PUA Dick is constantly seeking additional bitches in some tacky garish-cocktail-serving meat-market hell hole, and smugly reassuring himself that Miss Vacuous Drama Queen Bitch will be devastated by his failure to pick her up that night - while Miss Vacuous Drama Queen Bitch is sobbing herself to sleep at home and wondering why Mr Manipulative PUA Dick stood her up when he cooked her dinner and said he loved her last week - well, look on the bright side.

This means that the toxic fucked-up pair of them are both safely out of All Bar One on a Friday evening, so us nice normal people don't have to have shit to do with them.

There's also always the slim but beautiful possibility that the more dramatic repercussions of Mr Manipulative PUA Dick's behaviour - for example, when he fucks with Miss Mentally Unstable Psychotic Drama Queen Bitch by mistake, and she cuts his balls off - will take them both out of the gene pool completely for once and for all, where not even the faintest threads of ominous yellow can drift over to us innocent folks and spoil our swim. As she goes to Clitclink Nick and he discovers an interest in joining a falsetto choir.

That's me and Game finished, anyway. I promise, no more posts on the subject for a while.

Unless something else on the subject happens to inspire me. Hey, no guarantees (Game maxim 48: always keep them slightly on edge to maintain their attention.)

Love you lots (but your nose wrinkles up and looks funny when you smile, and your tits aren't as good as that girl's over there,)

J x

The Dark Lord Of The Syph ; A Tribute

2010-07-14T08:52:00.001+01:00

If I say so myself, I've been doing a damn good job of avoiding He Who Must Not Be Named's blog over the last few months. All it did was piss me off - and not in a good way like a Polly Toynbee column, leaving me entertainingly incandescent with rage. Just in an irritating 'I'm getting a damn headache from all this bullshit' way - like hearing a bunch of leering nimrods talking irrelevant ill-informed obnoxious shit behind you on the train, and you sort of vaguely wish that little green men would come down in a spaceship, zap the knob jockeys into dust with their ray guns and disappear into space once more. Leaving the world's average collective IQ just that tiny little bit higher.

But I just came across this tribute site to the Dark Lord of the Syph, and I have to say, it gave me a damn good giggle. If you're familiar with the works of the internet's greatest sexual visionary and philosopher, you may enjoy it. If you're familiar with some of the great man's regular commentators, you should read the comment sections too.

Respect the cock.

If you didn't already.

J x

There's Something About Scary

2010-07-13T11:26:00.006+01:00

Among the many things that piss me off about the PUA/He Who Must Not Be Named/TJ Mackey Appreciation Society/Respect The Cockosphere is the way its leading luminaries take universal 'self-destructive motherfucker with no self-awareness and less self-preservation' traits and ascribe them exclusively to women.

For example, the way they say women don't know what attracts them in the opposite sex - and claim they like one type of behaviour, only to gravitate helplessly towards its exact polar opposite.

I'm not saying this isn't true of a whole lot of women. It is (although in my case, I'm something of an exception to the rule - I know damn well what attracts me, and always have done. If I say different out loud, it's not self-delusion, but just that I'm fed up of performing my time honoured St Sebastian impression as every fucker in a five-mile radius forms an orderly queue to shoot arrows at me. Banal conventional platitudes are safer.)

I'm just saying, it's also true of a whole lot of men - and quite possibly even truer.

In any magazine article, nay in the PUAosphere itself, you'll read what men like. Men like nice and sane and smiley. Men like straightforward and drama-free. Men like sweet understanding reliable girls who treat them well, don't start scenes or arguments, never, ever humiliate them in public, and generally are as far removed from the realms of 'nutter' and 'liability' as it's possible to get.

Well, sorry, but from my not inconsiderable personal experience, I'll say this is total bollocks.

Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks.

Take the other day, when I was supposed to meet Mark for lunch, and he rang me up a few hours beforehand to say he was sorry but he had to go and see his kids.

Now, I know damn well that his own most recent ex was as far removed from my own straightforward, low-maintenance, understanding, undemanding style as it's possible to get.

I also know that, despite his complaints of her outrageous, unreasonable and stark raving mental behaviour, she had him wrapped round her psychotic little finger for the best part of five years.

And as the Roissysphere always insists regarding women - look at what they do in practice, not what they say in theory.

And so, when he cancelled our lunch plans, I should have thought 'what would his ex do in this situation?'

Which, from everything he's told me, would be start a huge fight, rage furiously at him for letting me down and taking me for granted, accuse him of spending the day with some other slag, then call him a fucking cunt and slam the phone down on him. And then drink a bottle of vodka and threaten to slash my wrists.

But I just can't. It's not me. Any more than it's me to swear at waiters or start fights on planes or strip naked and run down Oxford Street singing Jesus Christ Superstar.

What I actually said was:

'Oh that's fine, no problem. Have a lovely time and see you soon.'

And I'm sighing inside at the memory of this, because I know damn well from bitter experience that this sort of behaviour doesn't get filed by men under 'goodness me, what a nice understanding uncritical woman, I've found a keeper here.'

It gets filed under 'doormat/sucker who won't complain whatever you do, so take her for granted, string her along for as long as you feel like, then dump her over some random bullshit that wouldn't even have been the worst thing your psycho ex said or did in a typical day.'

You're almost certainly thinking wisely 'ah, she's just kidding herself that men prefer psychos. All things being physically equal between two women, the man's going to go for the nice sane understanding one any old day of the week - the ex was clearly much better-looking than Juliette and therefore could get away with much more.'

But I can tell you for an uncategorical fact that, at least in this case, you're wrong.

Because I've seen pics of Mark's psycho ex. And she's a munter. Even if you charitably assume that she's unfortunately unphotogenic, and that she's much more attractive in the flesh - and quite frankly she'd have to be Danny De Vito in drag not to be - the stark fact remains she was older than me by a good eight years and outweighed me by a good three stone. She didn't even have the decency to earn more or have a more glamorous job.

It's just a psycho thing.

An Inexplicably Adored Psycho Ex thing.

Men fucking love them.

And I had another ex, not so long ago, with whom I experienced exactly the same phenomenon.

Now, you may think that, if you spent several years of your life with a woman who routinely
threw screaming shit-fits about the least little thing, sent mind-blowingly fucked-up hate mail to all your female friends in the entirely unfounded belief that you were having affairs with them all, and refused to socialise with half your address book under the completely insane assumption that they were all paedos and punters - then you'd be quite pleased, nay thanking your fucking personal God, to then find yourself in a steady relationship with a woman who never so much as raised her voice to you, never complained about anything whatsoever, never criticised you about anything whatsoever, and would have died by inches before she'd done anything even remotely embarrassing to you in public.

You would also think that a petty drunken row about a birthday present wouldn't rate quite as high on the relationship-ending Richter scale as an attempt by the Inexplicably Adored Psycho Ex to push you out of a moving car.

But the predictable bottom line - I got dumped for the former, she got adored for the latter.

I've heard of some people getting away with murder, but when it comes to relationships, I always end up facing Old Sparky on a litter dropping charge.

I really wish I couldn't see it going the same way with Mark. Really, really, really.

Are there some special Elementary Psycho Bitch From Hell classes you can go to that make your man treat you better?

J x

Porn Again

2010-07-07T10:03:00.001+01:00

Okay, just to state this upfront - this post has no coherent thread uniting it, just a bunch of random thoughts. So it's apt to wander about like an old lady with Alzheimer's who can't remember where her house is.

But on the subject of porn and this debate on the Guardian site...

Unlike some of the more hysterical and nakedly bitter/twisted female commentators on this thread, I'm not threatened by porn at a physical level. And I think if a woman says she is, she's being a bit naive.

Unless of course you're living in Saudi Arabia, and it's eminently possible that your husband has never seen another woman's body in any detail - and will therefore react to porn like a previously-contented Victorian street urchin playing with a stick and hoop, who's just been approached by a malevolent Ghost Of Christmas Yet To Come and shown a Nintendo Wii.

If you live in an ordinary Western democracy, your husband will already have a crystal clear, if tactfully unspoken view of where you rate on a physical scale of 1-10. As the merest glance round any Saturday night high street - hell, five minutes spent watching pre-watershed telly - will give him an unambiguously regular low-down on other women's bodies and how yours stacks up to theirs.

Seeing a few silicon-titted tarts getting spit-roasted isn't going to change this situation one way or the other.

The 'he'll get dissatisfied and expect you to look like that' thing only works if he's a - already got suppressed resentful issues with him thinking that you're a bit of a munter, or he's b - 13 years old.

Perhaps I'm being overly generous to men here, but I don't think your average adult male with half a brain will suddenly think worse of his other half for not being platinum blonde, tanned to the colour of a Werthers Original, and being in possession of implausibly round, motionless and gravity-defying 38HHH tits - any more than, after she's watched Twilight, she'll suddenly think worse of him for not being 120 years old, inhumanly beautiful and going all sparkly in the sunlight.

Although as I said, maybe I'm cutting men too much slack here and they really are that fucking stupid and shallow.

In which case, I'd be apt to say good riddance, and best of luck finding the size 0, beachball-titted, double-anal loving, effortlessly orgasmic lady of your dreams.

If you can't find her after a few decades of diligent searching, try looking up your arse.

But anyway - back to the subject again. Specifically, back to the practices they're condemning in this article.

For a start, I don't quite get why the 'coming on her face' thing is supposed to be so horrifying and evil. Maybe I'm missing something, but the only way it's going to scare me is if the end product gets anywhere near my hair. This is apt to traumatise me in a big way - not because it's degrading and misogynistic, but because I'll then have to piss about for the next two hours washing, blow drying and straightening it.

Oh, and if it gets anywhere near my hair following my bi-monthly Brazilian Blow Dry - a life-changing invention of staggering genius, which I am now addicted to at a level which makes the Wire's Bubbles' heroin habit look like a passing fancy - I'd have a pretty good case for homicide (or at the very least, an invoice for £200 the following day. The lengthy procedure costs 200 quid and you can't get your hair wet for three days... so it strictly forbids rain, sweat and water generally. My stylist never specifically mentioned spunk, but you have to use your common sense on these matters)

Rather oddly when it's supposed to be the dark ne plus ultra of male desire, i've never been out with anyone who wanted the face thing - or, perhaps more accurately, I've never been out with anyone who had the balls to ask for it. If they had done, in fact, I would have uncategorically said yes, as I've always kind of wanted to try it.

This is not because of anything dark, kinky or twisted.

It's actually because I've read several apparently reliable sources (well all right, two - one of them was a book by Jackie Collins and one of them was 'a friend told me on a drunken night out') that claim that semen has actual skincare anti-ageing benefits a la the stem cell gunk they're flogging in Harvey Nicks for the price of a small Greek island.

For this reason, if someone came on my face, I'd be inclined to go into the bathroom saying I was going to wash it off, run the taps to sound like I was doing so, and and discreetly rub it into my face, neck and decolletage till it vanished from sight.

Then wait and see if miraculous results ensued, as I have done in the past with Strivectin, Glamtox Snake Serum et alia.

The skincare benefits of semen may indeed be an ingenious myth begun surreptitiously by the underground PR wing of the How To Get Her To Let You Come On Her Face Party - but I have to say, I'd still be curious to see if it does anything or not. Any anti-ageing treatment that's surreptitiously whispered of and is even remotely free, I'd be inclined to try it at least once.

I mean, Strivectin does absolutely fuck all, and I had to spend 120 quid finding that one out.

On the anal side of things, however, I kind of agree that porn's to blame for a whole load of grief - as it's taken this hideous, fucked-up and wildly unsexy practice into the 'feel free to ask for it in a relationship' mainstream. Believe it or not, I have yet to lose my anal virginity - and unfortunately, it's starting to look like Mark really wants me to. And with anal sex having rapidly gone from underground cult figure to global megastar, my reluctance to indulge him is starting to feel like absurd, even pathological prudishness. Like I'm refusing to give him a blow job because I think it's dirty or something.

He's relatively small, or I'd take the age-old anti-drugs advice and Just Say No - but even so, I'm really not looking forward to it. We haven't done it yet, but the prospect looms in my future like an annual audit. Horrible thoughts of potential mishaps creep though the byways of my mind, none of them pretty and all of them involving shit. I have some idea that enemas can help, but they don't seem to sell them in Boots or my local off-brand chemist - at least, not on the shelves. And if you think I'm going up to the lady behind the counter on my lunchbreak with a twenty-strong queue behind me and saying ' have you got anything I can use to rinse my arse out right before anal sex, so when my boyfriend pulls his dick out it doesn't look like a twiglet,' you can go and fuck yourself.

In my humble opinion, whoever took this particular erotic delight out of the Soho alleyway and into the sexual mainstream should be shot without a trial.

(And don't even get me started on the porn-championed ATM thing. I honestly can't think of any sexual practice out there that's more revolting and less erotic. Roman showers maybe, but even that's a close-run thing.)

Yuk yuk yuk yuk yuk.

J x

Sub/Dom and Dumber

2010-07-06T11:21:00.004+01:00

I thought I'd write a post just clarifying why what I like in bed doesn't mean I like thuggish men, or violence, or misogyny.

For a start, some of the most misogynistic violent thugs out there are also as sexually vanilla as it's possible to get.

Because the important thing about effective sub/dom sex is that it requires imagination and empathy.

And the important thing about misogynistic violent thugs is that they don't have the faintest trace of either of these qualities.

Which is why they're misogynistic violent thugs in the first place.

Which is why they're able to drone on self-pityingly for hours on end about how much easier women have it in today's society, without also thinking 'oh hang on, but they also have to worry about shitloads of things us men don't even have to think about, such as constantly being judged on their weight and looks and having to worry about their age as early as their late twenties.

'And facing constant worries about birth control the second they start having sex, because plenty of guys refuse to take any responsibility whatsoever for the issue, but will still start whining like little bitches about evil women trapping them into marriage if she gets pregnant by accident.

'Oh, and all the problematic issues associated with pregnancy - from stretch marks to abortions to loose fannies to breast-feeding to professional ruin - are their problem alone.

'Not to mention the fact they also have to contend with a shitload of ignorant dicks like me saying they're vain and shallow if they make the effort to look good and that they're failures if they don't.

'And that they're lazy boring parasites if they become stay-at-home mums and that they're failures if they don't.

'And that they're evil grasping whores if they bag rich men and that they're failures if they don't.

'Actually, maybe I live a charmed life as a bloke and should shut the fuck up.'

As for the violence thing - there is nothing, and I do mean absolutely nothing on earth that I find less sexually attractive than a violent, angry or out-of-control man. In fact, there's no surer way to send me running for cover than acting like this.

Here's a true-life example. I came a gnat's whisker away from dumping an ex when he lost his temper in spectacular style driving in a foreign country, started shouting and swearing, punched the dashboard, sending the sat nav crashing to the floor - and when I looked at him with numb, slowly swelling horror, I saw to my absolute disbelief that he'd started crying. Anything like this scares the living shit out of me, and this was a red flag of epic dimensions.

If we'd been in this country rather than abroad in the middle of nowhere where I had no visible way of getting home on my own steam, I would have been out of there so fast you wouldn't have seen my feet touch the ground.

Unfortunately, with the tiresome banal little details you'd never get in any self-respecting romance, I couldn't dump him immediately upon returning to Blighty. This was partly because all my stuff was in a massive suitcase I'd borrowed off him, I couldn't imagine what a pain in the arse it would be to send the bloody great thing back on its own, and it would have been unbearably awkward to meet up post-breakup to hand him the case in person. This sort of shit never happens in Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights.

Also, he had a big family wedding planned the following weekend, which he'd invited me to ages ago. And while I'd have been only too happy not to go to this event, it seemed needlessly cruel to leave him dateless at the eleventh hour with only five days to find a replacement, and very probably humiliate him in front of his friends and family by rocking up on his tod.

My intention was to give him his suitcase back, then be the perfect plus one at the wedding - well-behaved, friendly to all and sundry, taking it easy on the booze, laughing at his jokes, dressed to kill and generally making him look good.

After all, I thought, he was a lovely genuine guy despite the alarming deal-breaking glimpse of anger management issues he'd given me, and the least I could do was to make our separation as amiable and painless as possible.

Then, I planned, I'd get him to pull over to a cafe on the way back the following day - discreetly making sure I'd got my stuff with me in case he threw a wobbler and stormed off in the car. And once inside that cafe, I'd break the news as diplomatically as possible. Really like you, but. At a crucial time in my life. Not sure we have a long-term future. Etc etc etc.

But then he told me he loved me, on the night of the big do - and like a complete fucking imbecile I believed him. And I just couldn't bear to hurt him by dumping him right after he'd said that (I know, I know. You can see the end of this story coming already, right?)

I stayed with him for months after that, overlooking yet more spectacular red flags with the grim determination of Mrs Josef Fritzl ignoring those funny noises from the basement. A vast swarm of lifestyle-related, physical-related, personality-related and even psychological-related issues, any one of which should have been an instant deal-breaker all on its own. And there was yours truly, greeting them all with the same feeble internal refrain - well he's not exactly perfect but at least he really cares about me, right?

This was right up to the point where Mr Well He's Not Exactly Perfect But At Least He Really Cares About Me, Right? dumped me with the icy speed and efficiency of a stealth bomber - right on the eve of my birthday.

Honestly, what a fucking stupid cow.

Although having said that, maybe it's better to be the dumped than the dumper - not for altruistic reasons, but simply those of self-preservation. To put it another way, I know damn well I'm not going to turn into a mad obsessive stalker straight out of a Nicci French novel, but I've got no earthly way of knowing this for sure about anyone else.

Anyway, I appear to have wandered off topic here. Back to the point.

But I'm confused here, I hear you say. How can you say you hate violent men and aren't attracted to them when you like being dominated in bed?

I can't even believe I have to explain the difference between wanting a sexually dominant man and wanting a violent man - but I've had to explain it before, and I'm sure that some day, I'll have to explain it again.

And as before, I'm never quite sure how to start.

It's like having to explain the difference between going to see the new Toy Story movie and having a rusty chainsaw shoved up your arse.

If you don't get it, you don't get it.

Okay, I present two scenarios. Scenario one - your boyfriend ties you to the bed and whips you with a light belt, leaving faint red marks that'll be gone in a week max. You then have mind-blowing sex. Then he unties you, you kiss and cuddle up together, tell each other 'that was great' and go to sleep.

Scenario two - your boyfriend loses his temper because dinner's late. He smashes you in the face with a fist, breaking your jaw and knocking out four of your teeth - which puts you in hospital and leaves you permanently scarred. You lie to the doctor about falling down the stairs for fear of repercussions if you tell the truth, then go home to your boyfriend because you're terrified he'll kill you or the kids if you try and run away.

If you're still not seeing the difference here, I advise you to seek professional help as a matter of some urgency...

J x

Thugs and Kisses

2010-07-05T13:20:00.004+01:00

Of all the pernicious, misogynistic sexual myths which are disseminated like leprosy by the He Who Must Not Be Nameds of this world (I've said it before and I'll say it again - if you don't know who I'm talking about, please go home tonight and offer up a heartfelt prayer of thanks to your personal God), perhaps the most annoying is this. Their unshakable conviction that all women
are irresistibly attracted to violent, dangerous men.

Now, I know for a fact that this is 24 carat bollocks, because I'm not. At all. And I never have been. Not when I was 17, not when I was 20 and not now. As evidenced by the fact that I've consistently avoided them like the plague. In all my life, I've only ever been out with one guy who got involved in a fight while we were together - and that doesn't really count, because he got his arse kicked into the middle of next week and back by an opponent who was allegedly drunker than an eighteenth birthday party.

If you're going by the evo-psych theory explaining why all women lust after vicious hardmen, a guy who gets into fights with paralytic drunks and loses dismally is a Darwinian liability on an epic scale.

So to give the PUAs their due, I'll concede that a guy getting in a fight and losing is nowhere near as hot as a guy getting in a fight and winning.

Yet nonetheless - in my humble opinion - a guy getting in a fight and winning is nowhere near as hot as a guy not getting in the damn fight at all.

And I can't help thinking that, if someone better at chart-drawing than me drew a chart showing how much various women fancy the kick-boxing body-building doorman type - and how likely said women are to be the sort of Poundstretcher Pussycat Dolls who made my life a living hell back at school - we're going to see a clear and undeniable correlation.

Otherwise, it's a bit of a coincidence that so many of the vilest girls I knew in my youth gravitated towards doormen, amateur boxers, mixed martial arts intructors etc etc like St Tropez-coated moths to a flame.

This may be the helpful hand of Charles Darwin at work, ensuring that - if anyone's going to get beaten up or killed by some Happy Shopper hardman pumped up on test - it's a poisonous little chav slapper with an ego the size of North America and a brain the size of a peanut.

All of which couldn't help occurring to me when I read this story.

I hasten to add, lest I get linked to by some angry Facebook mob drenching me in furious emoticons and semi-literate txtspk - there's not a lot scarier than a Morlock with a keyboard - I don't know the full story of Raoul Moat and Samantha Stobbart here. I have no personal knowledge of Samantha or her new boyfriend, and can't possibly make any character judgements about her.

For all I know, Samantha Stobbart is a charming, bright, modest, self-effacing young lady whose life to date has been a delight to all who knew her. And whose apparent liking for unstable muscle-bound hardmen was as randomly out of character as my own taste for calendars with little fluffy kittens on them.

I'm just saying, from personal experience - the vast majority of women who share her tastes in men aren't like that.

I'd also like to quote directly from the Daily Mail:

On her Facebook page, Samantha Stobbart described herself as a 'yummy mummy' who was 'slim, suntanned, fun, fit and a rite laugh'.

Just a teenager when they met, she found Moat's hulking physique and reputation as a 'hard man' irresistible as their paths crossed at one of the Newcastle clubs where he worked.

Oh, and she also has a daughter named Chanel.

Hey, I'm not saying a damn thing.

J x

Tit and Titillation

2010-06-29T17:05:00.002+01:00

I don't know why this story pissed me off so much, as I haven't got kids and haven't got any pressing desire to have any. On a list of things I want in my life, they're well below Shih Tsus, tattoos and bungee-jumping classes - and only a few places above headlice.

So I'm as neutrally objective on this subject as it gets. If anything, I'd be naturally inclined to dislike the hapless Kathryn Blundell who claimed breastfeeding was 'creepy' - as, by nature, I'm slightly anti the relentless Cath Kidstony, Jamie Olivery smugness of the mummy set. They generally act like popping out a few kids is some sort of formidable world-shaking achievement,
instead of something your average cat will achieve quite effortlessly in the first year of its life if you don't take it to the bloody vet and get it spayed.

But the sheer toxic pious self-righteous holier-than-thou-ness of this poor woman's vile critics immediately define it as a case between good and evil as clear-cut as Harry Potter's ultimate
face-off with Voldemort.

I'm just instinctively alienated and antagonised by this pervasive self-righteous huffy sense that once a woman's pregnant, she's got absolutely no business thinking of the rest of her life, her husband, her future or her marriage. That her body, a la Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, is now purely a vessel for bringing new life into the world. And that anyone who disagrees is clearly some ghastly hothouse hybrid of Katie Price, Marie Antoinette and the Whore of Babylon.

The thing is, there are long-term implications to this much-vaunted physical unselfishness. And these implications will inevitably affect the baby as well.

I'd like to believe that there are a lot of lovely unselfish unsuperficial men in the world who will look fondly on the post-childbirth alternations in their partner's body - and will regard her newfound droopiness and stretch marks as augmenting her womanly beauty and desirability.

I'd like to believe that they'll regard the slim toned bodies of younger childless women with vague indifference, perceiving them as lacking and inadequate - devoid as they are of the eternal marks which demonstrate the true commitment and unselfishness with which their beloved wife has brought their offspring into the world.

I'd like to believe that, should one of these other women make a move on them, they'd rebuff
said ladies with instinctive disinterest, and hurry home to the arms of their very own domestic madonna. Who may never be a tight-fannied size 8 again - having been far too unselfish to diet during pregnancy or have an elective Caesarian - but that doesn't matter, because he loves her for the person she is, and doesn't even notice her new physical shortcomings.

And I'd like to believe that there's a little pixie called Twinkle that lives at the bottom of my garden and occasionally steals socks off my washing line.

Unfortunately, possibly due to being bang out of hallucinogenic drugs, I can't.

For the life of me, I can't see what's so selfish or wrong about not wanting to have your figure ruined, your sex appeal killed stone dead for the rest of your life, and your husband either brutally, subtly or silently sniping at you for having let yourself go.

If he's got any sexual options, probably leaving you and the kids for some tart whose boobs are still where they're supposed to be, and if you're very lucky indeed maybe sending back a meagre maintenance cheque every month.

If he hasn't got any sexual options, hanging around like a disconsolate lodger, letching over every perky pair of tits that appears on the telly, and completely destroying what little remains of your self-esteem.

Well, fuck yeah. That's got to be way better for a child than being fed some perfectly healthy and nourishing milk out of a sodding bottle.

I'm on Kathryn Blundell's side of this argument.

All her critics are a bunch of tits.

J x

The Greatest Sexual Regret Of My Life 2 - Breaking Don

2010-06-28T09:27:00.001+01:00

Christ, the feedback out there's getting bewildering. First I hear that most people couldn't give a toss about my film reviews. Then I hear that most people couldn't give a toss about my personal life with Mark and Don.

Well sorry guys, but I've got to write about bloody something now I'm back. As I've said, I may be called away again at any moment... I hate to be mysterious on the subject, but various other tiresome spare-time commitments which have bothered me for my months of absence have now lapsed into a state of uncertain limbo (a sort of Schrodinger's Potentially Time Consuming Pain In The Arse) and threaten to rear their ugly little heads again at any time. I could be called away tomorrow, I could be called away next month, and it may never happen at all.

So I'm savouring these precious moments with you, Constant Reader, and want to give you whatever your little heart wants most - unless it actually costs money or takes too much time, in which case you can go whistle out your arse for it.

And since the reader who urged me to focus on my personal life sounded like an interested fan with well-intentioned advice - and the reader who said nobody cared less about it sounded like a trolling cock - I'm going to focus on my personal life instead.

So to those who couldn't care less about Mark and Don, a quick warning. This post contains Mark and Don, so please stop reading it. Better yet, stop reading the bloody blog. Really, it's very easy.

I can just imagine you furiously perusing page nine hundred and eighty seven of A La Recherche du Temps Perdue in its original French. Muttering 'Jesus, this is so boring, I couldn't care less about these people and can't understand anything that's going on. And I don't even speak French.'

IF YOU ARE NOT ENJOYING READING SOMETHING, THEN BY ALL THINGS HOLY PLEASE STOP READING IT.

Christ on a bike, it's not rocket science.

Anyway, back to my Don regrets.

As I said in my last post on the subject, I didn't just do the right thing in cutting all ties with Don so as not to cheat on Mark. I did the only thing.

But it's just such a bloody life-haunting deathbed-regret disappointment.

Going out with Don would have been unsustainable, natch - but the fact is, it wouldn't have needed to be sustainable. A bloody week would have done it, leaving me with the best sexual memories of my life (not that that's fucking hard - in that particular department, the bar's set low enough for a centipede to crawl over.)

Of course, he was undeniably not Mr Right for the long haul - for anything remotely serious, I want to be seen as an equal partner, which he made unambiguously clear was not his thing. But nonetheless, he just instinctively 'got' things which have sailed way over the heads of pretty much every other guy I've ever tried to engage in this stuff. The nuances. The implications. The undercurrents.

As far as I can tell from my own romantic history - while most men are happy enough to try their hand at a bit of tying n' spanking, it's just not natural to them at all. And they'll consequently approach it like a conscientious third year schoolboy writing a letter to their French penpal - even if everything's technically 'there', the effortless fluency and inspiration are notable by their absence. J'espere que tu est bien. J'ai un lapin qui s'appelle Fluffy.

Take the clothing thing, for example. To most (okay, all) guys I've explored this particular avenue of sexuality with, the concept of why I should be naked - or wearing very scanty lingerie - and why they should simultaneously be fully clothed has sailed several thousand feel over their heads (along with all its underlying power-dynamic psychology.) So we'd both be naked at the same time and the whole look and feel just didn't work.

Only Don got this instinctively. When we were talking fantasies and prospective scenes, he mentioned this particular detail before I'd even referred to it. Most guys who write BDSM porn for a living don't even understand the whys and wherefores of this point, but Don sure did.

Or take the going down thing. They say it is better to give than to receive, and in this area, I couldn't agree more. I'm perfectly happy to give head till the cows come home, but I secretly hate receiving it. I secretly hate receiving it in every context, but I especially secretly hate receiving it in a specifically kinky context. It's just all sodding wrong. The psychology, the power dynamic, the motivations, everything. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. And the exact antithesis of everything I see as hot.

You can try and spin it how you like - going down on a tied-up woman is a form of control over her while she's powerless - but sorry, I ain't buying. As far as my never-going-to-change-my-mind-on-this instinctive reactions are concerned, it's just not a dominant act. The end.

Yet it's a hate that dare not declare its name, as for most guys, a woman not wanting or liking it is a slow-death deal breaker. And contrary to public opinion where they have to be forced 'down there' at pleading gunpoint, most hetero men are inexplicably obsessed with it (or it may just be sod's law that I've met all the cunnilingophiles... a general rule of life I've observed, you'll effortlessly get the things you don't want, don't like and don't give a toss about. Meanwhile, the things you'd kill your first-born child for will elude you for a lifetime as they're handed on a silver platter to other people who couldn't give a flying fairy about them. There are probably women out there who love nothing better than getting head and can't get it for love or money.)

But again, Don just instinctively 'got' it, without knowing my stance on the issue at all. For all he knew, it may even have been a deal breaker for me. But he was upfront and categorical that he never gave it, and he didn't see it as being a dom thing.

Again, we weren't just on the same page, but on the same damned line.

And then there was the not going on top thing. He said upfront that he didn't like it when the woman went on top. And I fucking hate this, too. Again, it just feels wrong, in a completely different universe from everything I like and everything that turns me on. With most of my exes, I've done it anyway without complaining, secretly reminding myself that it probably burns more calories or something, and at least it'll make them happy if I try and seem like I'm into it (although much fucking good it does me. There are complete bitches who treat their men like shit and get engagement rings - I go out of my way to do every damn thing they want, and get 'it's not you, it's me.')

And the fact he didn't switch at all. That's so crucial for me, I can't even begin to explain it. I'll write about this at another time, because it's such a complex issue that it deserves a post all to itself.

And perhaps most of all, there would have been the absolute certainty that it was his definitive numero uno turn on, and he wasn't doing it just to humour me. Whereas in all other relationships where I've cautiously and rather guiltily introduced this sort of thing to my bloke (like introducing a child by a previous relationship who's got three heads and a tail) I've always had lurking doubts on this subject. For me, there's literally no greater kink-related turn-off that a lurking suspicion that it's not the guy's thing at all, and he's doing it in a well-intentioned spirit off 'let's just get the weird stuff out of the way to please the crazy bitch and then I can get a blow job.' The more he genuinely likes it, the more I will.

What it boils down to is this. If you draw a circle representing what I want in bed and a circle representing what a random guy wants in bed and look at where they overlap - normally there is, at best, a tiny little area of overlap the size of a baby woodlouse.

And most of the time, they're two entirely seperate circles (as indeed is the case with Mark).

Whereas with Don, our respective circles were so damn close, it looked like the same one, slightly blurred.

And that's without even mentioning the looks. Christ he looked sexy... tall, tanned, ripped and dressed to kill, with a dazzling white smile and the brightest blue eyes I've ever seen. I had to really force myself to delete his pic off my phone, in which he was wearing a blinding white shirt and pinstriped suit trousers - and which, combined with everything else I knew about him, was pretty much a dark XXX-rated fantasy right there (cunningly disguised as a perfectly ordinary photo, which is quite a trick.)

I'm not sure what's so breathtakingly hot about an immaculately ironed and pressed white shirt and impeccably cut suit trousers, but it really fucking works for me. You can keep your firemen and your Roman gladiators, give me a yuppie with an evil streak.

Damn it, I am besieged by pointless regrets. Last time I felt like this, it was when I saw an authentic Herve Leger dress on the Clothes Agency website - red, which is a very good colour on me, size 10, my size - for two hundred quid (they're normally well over a grand and a half). I saw it in the morning, left it a few hours to dither about whether I could afford it or not - then went back at lunchtime and found it was gone without a trace. Doubtless snapped up by someone who wasn't a complete muppet and knew a once-in-a-lifetime bargain when it was staring them in the bloody face.

Although as I said before, if I could turn back time, I'd do the exact same thing Don-wise, as
Mark has far more long-term potential - and there's no sense jeopardising that for a random two-or-three-week fling. And I can certainly live with mediocre 'not really me at all' sex (let's face it, if I couldn't, I would have dropped down dead some years ago.)

*Sigh*

And we lost 4-1 to Germany.

J x

Older And Wiser 2 : Age Before Beauty

2010-06-24T08:36:00.002+01:00

With the perfect timing that so cruelly eluded me regarding Don, here's a prime example of what I was talking about last time - which just appeared in the Mail.

And another reason why it's better going out with a much older man.

Because how else would Jon Snow's new fiancee Precious ever be considered a pretty young thing?

Judging from her face, quite frankly, she wouldn't have been deemed above average looking even at eighteen. And in culture where, to a hell of a lot of men, a woman's considered sexually finished by 28, forget it.

In the eyes of the endlessly sexist, superficial youth-obsessed world I have the fucking misfortune to live in, this woman would be considered an invisible middle-aged munter if you stood her next to anyone even close to her own age.

But stand her next to a sixtysomething and hey presto - a miracle at Lourdes.

Read the comments, and everyone's talking about her like she's a cross between Cheryl Cole and Megan Fox and Helen of Troy.

With the men wistfully saying 'lucky bastard' and the women mostly tutting bitchily and saying 'no fool like an old fool, I bet she's after his money.'

It's like an optical illusion, and immediately works some sort of strange dark magic.

Dating a guy your own age, you sort of forget how nice it is to get surreptitious evil looks off every other woman in the restaurant.

And when you meet his friends' wives, the look on their faces is just a total picture.

Take it from me - fuck Prevage, fuck Glamtox and fuck Creme de la Mer.

The quickest and easiest way to look ten years younger is to go out with a much older guy.

J x