Why Everything Is Allegedly Great.

 If you're the sort of person who reads government reports, you might have noticed that recently, things are the best they've ever been. Crime is at an all time low, more and more people are being employed, and commuters are even happy about the state of the trains.
 If, like me, you're the sort of person who would rather stare out of the window than even attempt to read a government report, you might have noticed that none of this is true and the country has kind of gone to shit, in recent years.
 This assumes, of course, that you have a window. It's probably been nicked by that unemployed bloke who was laid off from the derelict train company.
 Plenty of reactionary thinkers will tell you that any good news is a lie, made up by some grand, over-arching conpiracy, but I'm not convinced that the people in power can run an egg and spoon race, let alone organise a complicated, Machiavellian plot to lie to us in the face of the evidence.
 This isn't to say that things aren't pretty crap - five thousand squaddies are about to hit the already saturated jobs market, and they'll rapidly find that their best chance of success was to have jumped on a landmine and become a paralympian, or failing that, a professional garden dibber for large plants.
 This ignores the strain of the combined staff of Jessops, Comet and Blockbuster will be putting on the job centres, to name the first three examples that came to mind.
 So yeah, I'm skeptical about the whole "more people are going back to work" statement. I'm equally skeptical of any other claim that things are going well for the nation, lately.
 This is not, however, due to some grand scheme to mislead us all.
 Instead, it all comes down to the samples. It's not the questions people are asked, it's the way in which they are asked them.
 Two days ago, I was in a train station to buy some lingerie.
 I'm kidding, I was there to catch a train, like everyone else at the train station.
 As I sat there, waiting for a train (as one often does in a train station for the catching of trains) I was approached by a pleasant old man who asked if I'd mind filling in a questionnaire about my journey.
 I've done his job myself - I once had a three day temp gig collecting data from train passengers with a clipboard. Because I'm not a total idiot (or particularly loyal to a three day temp job) I instead went to the pub and filled in the forms with a suitably random looking smattering of ticks and crosses.
 Apparently, they've gotten wise to that trick, because after I took pity on the old guy I was also asked to give my number in case his supervisor decided to call people at random to make sure we were real and had, in fact, taken the questionnaire.
 Still, worst case scenario, filling out the pages that the old guy gave me would give me something to do.
 Twenty questions later (approximately a quarter of the way through the form) I gave up and threw it away.
 The questions were incredible. One asked me to rate the "overall atmosphere" of the station.
 The overall atmosphere for any train station is "train station." Nobody has ever given a fuck about the ambience, mood lighting or general romance of a place which is only ever used - and the eagle eyed among you will have spotted me pointing this out already - for the catching of trains, and nothing else, ever.
 I gave up on the questionnaire (the old man was probably dropped into a fiery pit for his failure when they noticed mine wasn't mailed back in) but it made me think: What if I hadn't?
 What if I was stuck in a room and forced to work my way through something equally banal, of comparable length?*
 Like, say, a questionnaire about crime. Or unemployment.
 After eighteen questions on the "trains" form, I was so bored I decided I'd rather sit and stare into space.
 After thirty questions, by extrapolation, I would have completely glazed over and started ticking random boxes.
 By fifty, I'd have been screaming at them to do it to Julia, and by the end of it, I'd have signed anything you wanted just to make it stop.
 "Yes, crime IS down! Sure, there's no unemployment! The trains run on time! Everything is great! Just make the questions stop!!"
 We shouldn't look at the data the government is using. We should look at how dull the forms were that they used to collect it. 



*I wish I'd written this column a few years back, when a joke about Dan Brown's books would have fit really nicely, here.

What To Do With Your New Penis.

 In the wake of the mass shooting in Connecticut over Christmas, a meth-addled and probably inbred think tank over at the NRA decided that the best way to reduce the number of gun deaths in America would be to make sure everyone was armed, all the time, up to and including the kids.
 Whilst I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that this is probably not the best-thought-out way to eliminate shootings, and might not even be the best way forward in terms of policy, it does set an interesting precedent.
 This week, the U.S. millitary (who all have guns already, fact fans!) decided that it would lift a ban on women serving in combat roles.
 Statistics have shown, I'm reliably informed*, that the only major problem women create in combat is a psychological one. They're perfectly capable of performing, but they have an adverse effect on male soldiers.
 In battle, this adverse effect manifests as distraction. Male soldiers are more likely to stop what they're doing and help a wounded female colleague, and this can be counter-productive.
 Unfortunately, when NOT in battle, the above-mentioned adverse effects are a little less chivalrous. Put bluntly, female soldiers are at more risk of being raped than they are of getting shot.
 Luckily, the NRA's drunkest and most senile all-cousin think tank and jug band has shown us the way.
 From now on, to prevent rape, everyone will be issued with a penis, to be installed promptly and worn at all times.
 This might take some getting used to, but luckily, girls, I'm on hand to help you with your new love truncheon.


 1. Erections.

 Assuming you've been issued with a sexually mature purple-headed warrior, you're going to find yourself getting unwanted erections about every nine seconds from now until the day you die.
 This is normal.
 There are numerous ways to combat and conceal unwanted tumescence, from the old fashioned "ALWAYS BE SITTING DOWN" method to the more subtle "upward tuck" manouvre with the waistband of your underwear.

                                                                         [Fig.1]

 This method can prove tricky depending on size. I personally like to tuck it under my shirt and rest my chin on the tip, as I find it makes me look thoughtful.
 Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you attempt to slap or punish an erection away. For complex evolutionary reasons that science has yet to reveal to us, this will only serve to encourage it.

2. Urinal Ettiquette.

 Those who are currently using outdated, inwards-facing genitals will have to get used to peeing in a trough with other men.
 Whilst the common view that men are simple and un-subtle creatures may hold true in most areas of life, there are a large number of complex and unspoken rules when it comes to micturation, and as such, the average pub toilet is a social minefield.
 Above all else, you must attempt not to set off the insecurities of any of the parties involved in group urination, including your own. Placement is key to this.
 Suppose for example the following hypothetical arrangement of piss-holes:

 The man at urinal three is already in play, so you must now chose where to stand. Correct choices include urinal 1, and no others, ever.
 Standing closer than is strictly necessary implies that you are either a) looking at someone's cock or b) inviting them to look at yours. Nobody wins in either of those situations, especially as, in most gay bars, you can just walk up to someone who is interested in both seeing yours and showing you his and have a frank and earthy discussion about the matter, without the need for urinals.
 Now consider the following arrangment:

 Where should you be standing? If you chose "1." then you may also want to invest in a t-shirt that says "please don't laugh at my hilariously tiny genitals." Standing TOO far away from someone else in a public toilet is a sign that you have something to hide, and that that something is probably a micropenis. The correct place to stand in this instance was number three. The correct place to stand at all times when dealing with others is two spaces away. No exceptions.
 Occasionally, you will find yourself confronted with an empty row of urinals. In this instance, choose wisely. In a row of three, for example, NEVER pick the middle one as it will force someone else to stand next to you, which is against the rules.
 On certain rare occasions, you will have no choice but to cosy up to strangers with your dick out. If, for example, a row of three urinals has an occupant at the first and third position, the middle sink is your only option. In these instances, stare fixedly at the wall and try to look grim. If, during this process, one of your peeing comrades finishes and walks away, you will be left stood next to the remaining urinator. This is awkward, but unavoidable. If someone else comes into the room, resist the urge to turn around and shout, defensively, "I don't fancy him!" as this will make you look, in the words of Shakespeare, like you are protesting too much, and in the words of the bloke I said it to, "Get out of my way you fucking homo."
 You may also hurt the feelings of the other guy, who, for all you know, was hoping that you fancied him.
 Some people find it difficult to pee in front of others, and develop "stage fright." If this happens, contact your service provider, as there is a chance you might have a vagina, after all.

3. What To Do In Case Of Periods.

 Now that you've been fitted with your new, male, rape-proof organ, you might be wondering what happens when you menstruate. This is, in fact, a trick question. You have a penis now, and as a penis owner, any mention of periods should cause you to wince and shrivel back into yourself like a vampire in the sun, or at the very least cover your ears and go "LALALALALA" until the moment has passed.

4. Sex.

 Perhaps the most gratifying feature of your new yogurt cannon is the on/off nature of sexual gratification. It will now require surprisingly little maintenance and very little effort to achieve orgasm, and as soon as that occurs, you'll lose all interest in anything and go to sleep.
 Some of you, however, may need time to adjust to the fact that you've been doing things wrong all these years.
 I'm not going to help with this, because some women will find out that a hand-job at 45,000rpm is actually quite unpleasant, but they'll learn the hard way when they attempt to do it to themselves, and this is karma.
 Many women will also be quite annoyed to learn that some of the little tricks they picked up over the years were completely surplus to requirements and they could have got by with half the effort and a little more focus. If this is you, don't be insulted. Sure, you could have worked smarter rather than harder all these years, but the reason men didn't tell you that it was unnecessary to stimulate any more than one area is because we appreciated the effort you were going to, and didn't want to seem ungrateful.

 That's all for now, ladies. Follow these tips and your new penis will provide you whole minutes of pleasure, as well as years of awkwardness and stupid actions.


*Jack Reacher mentioned it in a book. I'm not going to argue with him, even if he is fictional. 

Great Moments in Life

 I'm a geek about the English language.
 I don't speak any others, so I'm biased, but I still love it.
 Conversely, one of the shortcomings of the form is that sometimes there's a situation that doesn't have a name.
 Here's an example: A friend of mine gave me some advice today and, unusually for me, I took it. I then referred to her as "boss," because I was doing what she said. She called me something unprintable (or at least unprintable on blogs where the author doesn't swear like a cunt with fucking tourettes) and I said that it was a nice thing, and that I didn't take orders from just anyone.
 She asked if I was paying her a compliment, and I said it was a compliment through action, not through words.
 I'm not sure if there's a word for that, but I don't know one.
 There should, however, be one.
 There's another situation which I love, and can't find a word for.
 I'd like to think it's a universal feeling.
 For me, there's a moment when I see an opening appear for a bad joke, or a groan-worthy pun, and time slows to a trickle. I can see it coming, big and slow and gorgeous, like a wolf looking at a crippled elk, like a baseball player knowing that the ball is gonna come right over the plate; like Joe Louis bouncing off the back foot and knowing the other guy's jaw and full momentum is coming right towards him.
 There's no word for that moment, but it's possibly my favourite feeling in life.
 Maybe my second favourite, right behind actually making the joke, which to me is the wolf's killing moment, or the crack of the bat, or the shock of the impact travelling up your arm as the other guy tumbles.
 Every so often, you get it vicariously, and tonight was one of those beautiful, golden moments.
 I was on a message board thread from Reddit, talking about doing terrible things for justifiable reasons. One poster said his boss had a kid with cerebral palsy, who was allowed to get away with anything because of the condition. The kid was running around (or "going around," more accurately) kicking people who worked for his dad, and the poster warned the kid that he would kick back if provoked. And then, when provoked, did.
 So the terrible, justified thing was kicking a child with cerebral palsy.
 A few posts below, someone commented "I have cerebral palsy and I approve!"
 This led to someone else asking this poster what it was like to have a normal brain but be stuck in a defective body. Someone else chimed in that it's always unpleasant; that they had a brother who was crippled.
 The cerebral palsy poster said that he'd been that way all his life and knew no different, and that for the most part it wasn't so bad, but there were certain things he needed help with.
 The poster with the crippled brother said "Yeah, I sometimes have to carry my brother when his chair won't fit in places."
 Then, in a perfect, ball-over-the-plate moment, someone asked: "Is he heavy?"
 There was a fluid, pinpoint-accurate swing, the sharp snap of an impact, and the reply.
 "Nah, he ain't heavy. ...He's my brother!"
 You'd never know it, but I have moments where I fucking love people.

It's Okay To Laugh.

 Being mentally about nine years old, I get so squealingly excited when it snows that I make noises only normally heard emitting from a startled BeeGee. Snow is awesome. It's weather you can play with.
 As today was one of the better snow days in recent memory, I took myself and a crack team of blondes to a local park and attempted to build the Greatest Snowman Ever.
 Somewhere along the line, things went a little awry.
 Up to a point, everything was going according to plan, and we had ourselves a pretty kick-ass snowman. Lacking a pipe, I brought an old cigar and added that to the face, and then someone added the blonde wig we'd brought along, and we realised we'd accidentally built a snowy replica of Jimmy Savile.
 It was, to put it mildly, fucking hilarious.
 As sheer dumb luck would have it, we'd decided to build a dual-faceted snow person, so that on one side it was male and on the other, female.
 The female side faced the footpath, so not too many people saw Jimmy Snowvile.
 I felt relieved about this, as people with children (or unpleasant pasts) probably don't see the funny side of Jimmy Savile. It doesn't matter how much I think a snowman paedophile is funny; a lot of people won't agree that there's anything inherently amusing about Jimmy.
 They're right, of course. The things he did were terrible. Except I'm pretty sure we should still laugh at him, in some capacity.
 This is not, I shouldn't need to point out, because I think child abuse is funny.
 What I do think is that it's dangerous and bizarrely empowering to treat Savile and his ilk as monsters. By making them into the bogeyman, we risk making them more than the sum of their parts.
 A large part of Savile's modus operandi, it has emerged, was intimidation. "Don't tell on me, I'm important and well-connected," was his basic deterrent.
 He was undoubtedly well connected, but the ability to threaten only works if people are treated seriously.
 You can't be threatened by a punchline. You can't live in fear of the laughable.
 So instead of treating paedophiles as dark monsters from our nightmares, shouldn't we really be exposing them as what they are? Sad weirdos who should be mocked and shunned. If that happened, they would lose a good deal of their power over their victims. In a lot of cases, they wouldn't get to HAVE victims, as the ability to cajole and pressure tends to dissipate if you teach your kids to laugh at the lonely pervert and report him for trying to tempt them into a van with sweets. They're not criminal masterminds, for the most part. They're just unpleasant nutters who deserve ridicule.
 Sex crimes are horrible. I understand that. But they're made somehow more horrible if the sense of foreboding that the media instills is factored in.
 At the very least, if we're not going to be okay with making jokes about paedophiles (and I'm of the opinion that jokes about anything are alright, as long as they're funny) then we should be talking about them honestly instead of in a collective frightened whisper. Take away the mystique. Make them at worst scummy, and at best a group to be ridiculed as they're led away in chains.
 On reflection, it's probably alright to laugh about Savile.
 It's what he would have hated the most.

Does Anyone Fancy a Pint?!

 Many people see January as a sort of festive hangover. A month to regret the holiday season and all of its excess.
 Certainly, in the bar industry, January is the doldrums; a flaccid, empty time where the wind barely trouble's the sails of any bar, and the men slump, exhausted and lethargic, in various corners, waiting for salvation.
 So it's only natural that various charities have jumped on the bandwagon and encouraged people to get on the other wagon. The one without a bar.
 I have mixed feelings on this.
 First and foremost, I find it encouraging that people in this country treat "not drinking" as a major challenge to the average person.
 That says a lot about the national character, and more importantly makes my own drinking look like less of a problem.
 At the same time, I'm broadly against anything that involves giving up drinking, because, as science has shown, fuck that.
 Alright, maybe it wasn't science, maybe it's just people I talk to, but the point of "fucking that" still stands.
 The one thing that has caught my attention more than any other, however, is that there are two charities that are publicly endorsing a month of drinking abstinence for January.
 One of them is Cancer Research, an admirable charity who are sponsoring a "Dryathlon" for the month.
 Clever use of a portmanteau word; worthy cause; I can see no problem with this.
 The other people encouraging us to put our drinks down are the not-at-all-vested-interests over at "Alcohol Concern." They're launching - get ready for this, fans of catch slogans - "Dry January."
 These people, quite simply, are the enemy.
 They are announcing themselves from the word go as a group of busybodies - alcohol concern. They're not treating people with serious substance abuse problems, they're just worrying about alcohol as a concept, which is puritan paranoia at its finest. They're also sufficiently dull as a group off people that the best name they could come up with for a sponsored abstinence programme in January was "dry January."
 I don't want to give the dry movement any ideas - they are, after all, the enemy - but I have to say that as a general rule of thumb, they're never going to win converts from the drunk crowd until they lighten up and prove that they're having as much fun as the rest of us.
 And that's impossible, because LOOK at these fuckers:

                                                        Anyone else fail to see the threat?!

 The article on the BBC site that made me aware of the humourless, beige campaign being waged on honest drinkers by Alcohol Concern also went on to point out famous teetotalers. To whit, they listed four: Alistair Campbell, a man who has as much soul as a stainless steel autopsy table, Catherine Tate, a woman who wasn't funny when she was famous, and is now nostalgic for that time, Jessie J, who is Jessie fucking J, and Frank Skinner, someone I admire and respect, and who is only teetotal because he used to have a massive, crippling drink problem.
 To recap, the best argument for never drinking that the news can dredge up consists of three cunts and a man who used to drink to the point of serial incontinence, which is hardly a compelling argument to the rest of us functional alcoholics.
 Stop drinking for January, if you want.
 Stop drinking for you. Stop drinking for fun. Stop drinking for cancer research.
 But for Christ's sake, don't stop drinking because the non-drinkers tell you to, any more than you'd listen when the Pope tells you not to get laid.
 
 

Aw, Yew Guys!

 If you're reading this any time after about June of 2013, there's a chance you're the only one left.
 The rest of us will, of course, have been arrested by Operation Yew Tree, because it turns out that everyone in Britain was committing sex crimes in the seventies, including but not limited to me, you, Bagpuss, the Grand Old Duke of York, Carol Vorderman and Spotty from "Super Ted."
 Notice anything about that list of suspects? Aside from the fact that a lot them are fictional (me, Bagpuss) and several of them weren't around in the correct time frame (you, the Grand Old Duke of York) and at least one of the others is an alien, an important factor is that none of them held (or hold) any real power. Except Vorderman, who is Keyser Soze, but we'll ignore that.
In a week that has seen the always lovely Jim "casually racist, emphatically wife-punching" Davidson arrested for sex crimes, it really has begun to feel like all of light entertainment from our collective childhood was apparently involved in unspeakable acts with... well, with our collective childhood.
 Except, the more arrests are made - the more the veil is lifted and the rock pushed back to reveal the worms beneath - the more we all seem to wake from a collective hysterical blindness. Savile was obvious, looking back, but again: So is Jim Davidson. Is anyone really shocked that a repellent, right-wing misogynist might have behaved badly when it came to powerless young girls? Bearing in mind that the woman he was married to was being beaten up pretty regularly, it's hardly a stretch of the imagination.
 Are there any other people who obviously fit the bill? Yes. People like Rolf Harris, a man who never had children, but spent his career surrounded by them, and who, in a shockingly under-reported piece of news, is currently on suicide watch at the Priory after being questioned by police as part of the ever growing Yew Tree.
 Jimmy Savile, Freddie Starr, Jim Davidson, Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter, Max Clifford... anyone faintly creepy seems to have turned out to be legitimately creepy, and there's more to come.
And again: None of them are important.
 There comes a point in this argument where I have to abandon reports and start speculating in a potentially libellous way*, so here goes: There was pretty clearly clearly a  wide ranging paedophile ring at work in British entertainment. These people were also involved with very high level politics and the Royal Family.
  Jimmy Savile has been described as a "marriage counsellor" to Charles and Diana, which probably goes some way to explaining where THAT went off the rails.
 Jim Davidson has done a number of private gigs for the royals, as he is very fond of telling anyone who will listen.
 Rolf Harris painted the Queen in a private sitting for a BBC puff piece.
 All three men have had various titles and honours bestowed upon them (Sir Jimmy, Jim Davidson OBE, Rolf Harris CBE) and it seems beyond credibility that there can have been this many sex offenders moving in similar circles without them having been aware of eachother.
 It seems equally unlikely that someone in government or at the palace (realistically, several someones) wouldn't have known something, too.
 Here's what I'm driving at: Yew Tree is going to run and run. It's going to uncover a lot of unsavoury shit. But it's going to run exactly as far and uncover exactly as much as the powers that be will allow. Is it any coincidence that the only politician caught so far is one who happened to be dead?
 There is, almost certainly, a huge and powerful group of people at the heart of this, and they're panicking. It has emerged that thirty years ago, there was sexism and abuse on a mass scale, and everyone thought they were going to get away clean because they were too important to be called on their behaviour.
 Now the balance of power has shifted. And rather than risk getting caught, the more important people in the firing line are doing the smart thing. They're sacrificing pawns.
 Years ago, some more modern and anti-establishment comedians came up with a show called "Bring Me The Head Of Light Entertainment." It turns out that this year, we'll probably get it. But we're only being given the head to save the rest of a body comprised of who-knows-what. The Old Boys Network, of which Savile et al were the clown princes, is dangerously close to getting caught in a legal nightmare. They're throwing the more high profile names overboard in the hopes of placating - or at least distracting - the public long enough to clean house.
 In my imagination right now, the shredders are running day and night in the Lords, the Commons, at the Palace, and in every other corner of the establishment. They - the great faceless they that run us all - know far more than they're letting on. It's just a shame we'll probably never find out what.


 *Okay, I don't HAVE to engage in libellous speculation, but I'm gonna.