Incest and Folk-Dancing is closed

I have decided to house all of my prose on my poetry site 'First Boredom, Then Beer', to take advantage of the marginally higher traffic and because, one supposes, it's a bit much to expect people to look at TWO websites. For all those who have kept themselves up at night worrying whether or not I will be coming up with any ground-breaking essays similar to ones on this hallowed page, do not fear... more is to come.

Zeppelin Heights

THE COLD AIR tightened my face as I stepped out onto the flight pad. I popped up the collar of my bomber jacket and tugged at the edges of my leather gloves. The air fogged up in front of me as I hurried the kids into the cockpit of the blimp and then followed them in, and struggled to seal the hatch tight.

I swore at the memory of Abe Feldman’s name, that bloody mechanic had promised to fix the seal of my hatch for six months before he died. Blimp accident. Fifteen people I know have died in various blimp accidents over the last two years but I’ll be damned if those fascists in Downing Street are going to ban the nation’s favourite mode of transport.

I checked the mirrors to see if the wife had untied the blimp from the side of the house and we were off, the blimp slowly thundered off down the street towards the school. Mrs Horowitz waved as she came along in the opposite direction in her oversized AirCad. I waved back, making a mock salute against my flight cap, much in the same way I have for the last fifteen years.

I turned in my seat and separated the kids who were fighting over a slinky or Rubick’s cube or something but before I could sort the problem there was a terrible grinding and shattering as I realised I had mounted Joe Grub’s roof. Insurance will pay for that, of course. As I looked out over the high-highway tens of blimps drifted across my field of vision and the pink sky. An explosion drew my attention away from the scene, I check my mirror to see that Mrs Horowitz’s blimp had gone up as she’d tried to park it in that eyesore of a garage her son had put up last July. I’d tried to get a petition going to make her take it down.

Sweets for my sweet tooth

THE YEAR BEGINS anew. The ‘10 becomes ‘11. Noughties turn into – what, teenies? Our better halves proclaim diets for all and slap a prohibition on the Mr Porky’s even as we’re bitterly sucking the last few orange creams. As she spends most of her spare time not conducting an affair but training in the gym, presumably for an affair, it is reasonable to assume that the diet is a hint in my direction.

Thereafter, as I sift through shopping bags turfing aside Alpro yoghurts and bulgur wheat in search of Msr. Kipling’s finest, I’m want to ponder the subject of addiction. We all know it’s a powerful thing, but it’s a real kicker when the fix you need no longer exists.

It’s a sure sign of age when the sweets you enjoyed as a child/adolescent/student are no longer in production. Where are the Golden Cups? the Bursting Bugs? the fabled Winner Tacos? Come on, old man Rowntree, cut me some slack here. Another sign of age is swearing that new and old sweets that are available don’t taste ‘like they used to’. Never, I’m quite sure, has anyone uttering these words considered that their tastes might have changed, both through the physical degradation of the taste buds and the diminishing psychological drive to devour half a Milka – a large Milka – before dinner.

But that’s addiction for you; you have to keep at least trying the sweets or how will you know what they don’t taste like anymore? Some of us go to extreme lengths to indulge a waning sweet tooth: some of us actually import all kinds of things from the other side of the Atlantic ocean just to have a bowl of Fruit Loops and a significant other who can tell her friends that we refuse to grow up.

Showdown at the Library of Babel, part II

Showdown at the Library of Babel, part I

About two weeks prior to Christmas I ordered a selection of books from everyone’s – well, mine, at least - favourite online book emporium, each costing no more than a penny plus the exorbitant p&p. I was fully aware that ice, snow and Christmas cripple the entire infrastructure of this country, especially our doughty postal workers; so I thought it might take over a week to receive them. Out of the four books purchased two came within about a week, of the other two, both bought from the same seller (but packaged separately…), one arrived on the doormat in the last days before Christmas but the last one I received yesterday. The fourth of January.

Now, I wasn’t particularly miffed about the late delivery but on closer inspection of the received package it had been crudely folded and bound up with brown tape on one side – I, initially, assumed to make it more ‘postable’ – and after removal of this tape I discovered that the package's corrugated seal had been broken. Fine, I thought, so someone’s had a go at it and discovered the contents weren’t their bag. Fair enough.

Only then I realised that the back cover and the last three pages had been torn vertically in half and discarded. I shook the packet. Not in there. I sat staring at this conundrum for a good few moments. The seller had listed it as being in ‘very good’ condition. They confirmed for me that before dispatch it was indeed intact. I was perplexed. Had someone really been so offended by The Alan Coren Omnibus that they had shredded the last few pages (a parody of The Great Gatsby no less) in order to make an anti-feuilletonistic statement and bunged it into the post again? Perhaps with a kind of ‘I’ll show this doubled-barrelled twit satire!’ sentiment?

I relayed this story to my good friend Prof. Edmund Prygge the other day; his only reaction was to shake his head, as he ground up a common blue butterfly into chocolate snuff, and say, ‘Alan Coren, eh? Well, if you will play with fire...’ I idly pushed some not-quite-stale Christmas cake around my plate.

Four reforming finches...

AMONGST THE RUINS of the frozen and desiccated herb garden this morning I spied four familiar goldfinches with an obvious penchant for haute cuisine pecking merrily about. This is of course the so-called ‘gang of four’, as the tabloid press has dubbed them. Four finches that, in these times of austerity, have not opted to fly south to Africa for the winter, like those preening birds of paradise, but have decided to stay and tough it out with the proletariat tits and sparrows.

Admirable behaviour like this is rarely seen in the bird world; from the notorious underhanded behaviour of those liberal cuckoos to the lumbering greed of the more conservative waddling fowl – all of these and many other feathery followers flock to the balmy post-equatorial climbs – only to return when the good times are great the following spring. Is there, I wonder, a move to place sanctions upon deserting/returning birds; seed-exiles, if you will; should we, the hapless dupes who spread seed throughout the land indiscriminately, opt for a reform of bird feeding policies? Perhaps giving lower rations to non-dom avians and supplementing fat-ball credits for those doughty few who remain our yearlong garden companions?

After all, what is an English garden without the aesthetic flurry of activity provided by these airborne performers? Those who provide the most entertainment should be given the most reward.

It's Christmas?

BEING LOCKED AWAY with a glass of port and a slice of game pie, like some exiled club bore (sans tweed), is a synecdoche for the main benefits of the yuletide season; libation and gluttony. In one’s own company Christmas is a time of peace and quiet sanctuary. Suffice to say that this is an idyll have I yet to enjoy. As when you add practically anyone else to the equation, even people you like (not to mention those whose company you are forced to endure only at this time of year), the burden of enforced jollity and having to hold back on the gin is enough to break the spirits of the most persistent caroller.

Speaking of which, I am lucky enough to live beyond the boundaries of several high-security fences and starved packs of attack dogs, and thus I can avoid a pack of yobs mumbling the first verse of ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ – which they begin to ‘sing’ only after you have opened the front door (entrapment). But it doesn’t end there. Wall-to-wall guilt-trippingly tearful charity ads? Ruined ‘Uncle Buck’. Free sample of M&S mince pie, sir? Using more sawdust than last year, I see. E-card of a family I’ve never met from a person I can’t stand? Why do I even have a junk mail filter?

All of these, however, I almost gladly submit myself to, thanking the spirits of Christmas, when I realise with bile-fizzing relief that I don’t have to suffer the annual hardships that many millions of people across the globe surely must experience in the form of the office Christmas party. Not belonging to any such organisation (though Will Self does provide a solitary alternative) I have never joined a conga-line around the desks, photocopied my intimate parts, thrown up on my boss (or vice versa) or a potentially reputation-ruiningly bad tryst with the-blonde-from-accounts. Some people would yell ‘bah humbug’ at me or call me a ‘Grinch’ for such unseasonable misanthropy – but let them jeer; let bad gifts and unwanted relatives come – for I am one of the sainted few who can hold their heads up high safe in the knowledge that, no, we did not have any Lambrini with that new temp under the desk.

Snow danger

AS I was thawing out the butter the other morning I overheard that British motorists are once again under the cosh of John Law: a £60 on-the-spot fine for anyone caught with snow on their car’s roof. The radix malorum? An attempt to stop any snow coming off said roof during transit and hitting cyclists.

Two questions come to mind: why are cyclists peddling about in the snow and why aren’t our sensible motorists being rewarded for causing them harm? This obviously opens the floodgates to a terrible litany of snow-related litigation and bureaucracy; postmen suing when, after taking receipt of a package, your closing the door displaces the snow above the portico, health and safety nuts coming around assessing the risk of our icicles and, of course, squirrels prosecuting you when they slip off the roof.

Furthermore, I have no doubt that the benefit-seeking classes will flock to their stolen bicycles in their thousands, desperately hounding some poor soul with snow on his car until, upon his accelerating away, he gives them the necessary pelt of snow so they can hit the speed-dial to a waiting meretricious no-win-no-fee shyster.