The next door neighbours have got another piece of furniture in their front yard – it’s the armchair that matches the sofa that was there for over six weeks.

There’s another sofa straddling the alley gates where our bins get collected from.

There’s a bag of rubbish dumped in our newly-emptied bin.

Fucking scrubbers.

FOO!
Saw the Foo-Fah Fighters at the City of Manchester stadium last night: brilliant.

I didn’t have my big camera with me, so the zoom’s not particularly brilliant, but hey, that’s life.

Waiting 45 mins to get to the bar, finally getting served as the band started their act, then being told that there was no water and only one bottle of Diet Coke? Absolute fucking bollocks.

If these stadiums are so utterly rubbish at providing bar services. Look at them all with their Fosters packs on their backs! Where were the bastards selling soft drinks?

Why don’t they just let people bring their own soft drinks in instead of being total Nazis about it?

Arseholes

A few months ago, a Vanity Fair issue had an article on the history of the horror film genre. One “must see” film that was mentioned was Wes Craven’s very first effort The last house on the left. Described as “the film that started a genre”, I thought I’d take a look at it and bought the fucking thing without reading the IMDB reviews. Bugger me. Let’s just say: really, really, slow; truly disturbing, but mixed with the most bizarre Benny Hill sequences.

We didn’t get to the end of it. No doubt there’d have been a sing-song finale with people waving body parts.

If anybody wants my copy, let me know and you can have it.

Jeez.

The last hobbit cave on the left
Of course, we have our very own Last house on the left here chez Trumpsniffers. Ours is adorned with all sorts of horrific accoutrements of shite; an inside-out torture chamber designed to assault the last resistant fibres of good taste.

We’re racking our brains, trying to think of something that’s not illegal that we can do to it when we leave. Our first instinct was to cut down the windchimes and post them back to them, bit by bit – criminal damage/kidnap/torture; it wouldn’t look good on my next police check. Besides, I don’t think there’s ever a time when at least one of them isn’t looking out of their front window, spying on the street to see who pauses for a millisecond too long near THEIR parking space. I’m tempted to hire a company to paint their very own parking bay for them – you know how some houses have a disabled bay marked outside their homes, this special one would be identified by the word “cunt”. But the expense!

Oh, what can we do? We’re chucking out a load of pans when we go and Trump has suggested we tie strings to the handles and donate them anonymously with a note explaining that they might like some more jangly shit to hang from their house.

Or should I just post their address and postcode here so all the good people in Blogworld can donate any old shit that they want to get rid of? I know a film they might like…

New toy
Soon enough, I’ll be able to post a Youtube clip of Trump playing with her new ukulele, but not yet; she’s not quite got the hang of Toxic and she wants to be able to put in a virtuoso performance for her fans.

I’m not referring to the new vaccum cleaner we bought last week either. I mean, what can you say about a bloody vacuum cleaner? NOISY!

No, the new toy to which I refer is this:

This is a rather nifty iPod dock that incorporates a DAB/FM radio and auxiliary input. 30 watts output with a subwoofer, plus a fully-functional remote control. Cool eh?

It’s all part of our efforts to be tidier once we get into Bellend Towers. So the big component stereo system is going into Trump’s play room, along with the gazillion CDs that she owns. Although we’ll never be the sorts of people to buy an expensive shelving unit and not put anything on it a la Grand Designs (what’s the fucking point in doing that?), minimising the items stored to just books will be OK.

We’d been impressed with a Bose system that our friends had, but not so impressed with its £300 price tag (or the fact that it was just an iPod dock), so when an Amazon search came up with this for £100, it seemed like a relative bargain.

Now all I need to do is get some music on Trump’s iPod that I like.

We have a digital kitchen timer that beeps for every corresponding minute of the time that you set.

Fuck me. Setting it for a baked potato is REALLY annoying.

Other annoying things that beep include alarm clocks. What joyous things they are. You’re at your most comfortable in the land of nod, heavy with sleep, deep in dreamland. And it all gets shattered by a single, quiet beep. A beep that replicates and amplifies the longer you leave it. Which utter bastard invented the alarm clock? It must’ve been much better in them days when people got knocked up by somebody banging on the window with a stick. Perhaps. Who knows? Perhaps somebody got fed up with being knocked up and invented the alarm clock as an alternative.

Inventive people should be shot.

Some people wrap their potatoes in foil before baking them. I scoff at those people.

Cocks and Gussets have sent out our revised mortgage offer letters. Wankers.

Vid du freaks
We’ve just been watching the video to Pat Benatar’s Love is a battlefield on Virgin’s music on demand service.

It’s got it all, but mainly it’s got freaks in abundance. Check it out:

We had a mortgage offer from a well known lender, I’ll call them Cocks and Gussets, about three weeks ago. It had the wrong address on it. We told them straight away, in fact our financial adviser told them before they even sent the letter out, and we were told that a modified letter would be sent to us.

In the meantime, our financial adviser also had told them to rectify a £50 difference in price of the property, and our solicitor had asked them for confirmation that they were OK with the incentives offered by the developers (they have to do this, apparently).

Here’s an e-mail I’ve just received from Ken, our solicitor (Keith is our financial adviser):

I have called C&G today to ask what progress had been made in dealing with our letter of 13 May 2008. The operative I spoke to said that when they received the letter, they wrote to Keith asking him to either confirm a reduction in borrowing or change to a new product. They went on to state that they only received Keith’s response on 27 May 2008.

This is not correct. I spoke to Keith on 22 May 2008 and he had already replied to the letter by fax that day.

Further, C&G had no record of my phone calls of 22 and 23 May 2008, and no record of the ‘urgent’ status that I had been assured had been given to the file.

I have now been assured that the matter has been marked urgent and that the relevant team will be made aware that we need a response.

For good measure, I have called Keith this afternoon and asked him if he had any further information. He reiterated that he replied to the letter on 22 May 2008 and agreed to go and call them straight away. He has since called me back to confirm that the matter was given ‘urgent’ status at 3pm today (the time of my call !!) and should be dealt with within 6 hours.

JOY!

I’m just leaving it to them, then Keith is going to put in a formal complaint, for what it’s worth.

Sex and the city
The film that millions of people (women) have been waiting for came out yesterday. It’s not really of interest to me since I’ve never watched the show apart from the penultimate episode, however I know that LOADS of people are really into it. So much so that I heard today that lots of women went to see the film dressed as their favourite characters from the show.

Blimey.

How fucking pathetic, I thought when I heard it, I bet you wouldn’t get a load of lesbians dressing up as their favourite L Word characters if a film was made based on the show.

Of course you bloody would, only they’d all dress as Shane and Alice (and perhaps Max) because we know damned well that Bettes, Tinas and Helenas are a total myth. Oh, I forgot Jenny. Jenny’s a cunt.

I’d post some pictures, but I can’t be arsed. Click here or here if you want.

That’s the default response from government ministers and Labour PMs in the wake of Gordon Brown’s premiership going into a spectacular, but very welcome, nosedive.

Petrol costs about £1.12 a litre (this week), with diesel costing even more. Something like 70-80% of this goes to pay off debt that resulted from Gordon’s ten year stint as Chancellor, not on roads or transport or anything. Since 1st April, the Treasury has had £500m bonus in extra tax revenue because of the price of oil and its knock-on price of fuel at the pump.

Oh, and petrol tax is scheduled to go up by another 2p a litre in the autumn.

In addition, the motorists are due to face another smack in the face when drivers of older cars see their road tax potentially double next year. The reason? They want to punish drivers of older cars simply because they can’t afford to buy newer, less-polluting models, whether the newer models are less polluting or not.

Costs are going through the roof, it doesn’t help that the cost of moving things around has gone up 30% since last year.

People are struggling, really struggling, and they’re getting continually hammered by a government that’s supposed to represent the average working person.

Instead of doing something to help, the government is “listening”. Get on and fucking do something, you useless, fucking turds.

Are they going to? I doubt it, “Climate Change” minister Joan Ruddock says that, although it’s painful, we MUST press on with our environmental targets.

So essentially, fuck you Britain, we’re going to milk you till you die while all our competitors get away with doing sod all to combat climate change.

If climate change really was such a problem, they’d be making damned sure that China, India and the States were doing their bit, rather then punishing their own people on an insignificant, shitty island.

But they don’t really give a shit about the environment, it’s just a really convenient lie that they use to steal from us to pay back the debt we’re in, to pay for all the scumbags to carry on breeding, to pay for pet social projects in the UK and the third world because of our incompetent shit of a prime minister.

Gordon Brown says he’s listening. Well, listen to this – JUST FUCK OFF AND GIVE US A BREAK!

Tossers.

VOMIT
Trump’s been poorly. We thought she was getting better yesterday, but last night, just after I’d fallen asleep, there was a panicked rush to the bathroom, followed by sounds of projectile vomiting, amplified by the toilet bowel. Rocky tried to help by pushing his head between Trump’s face and the pan; I was called upon to retrieve him.

Poor lass was quite ill and had to get up again shortly after. And then she had hot and cold sweats and shivers.

Did I mind being kept awake throughout the night when I had a conference call at 8am? Hell no. I know she’d look after me in the same circumstances.

Love is, eh?

Teeth
Another rip off is dental treatment. Even as an NHS client, it costs £16 for a check up and clean – that’s for about 2 minutes’ work if you include a scale and polish.

Scale and polish, I had it done today and it really hurts. After this procedure, it feels like I can get my tongue through the gaps created in between my bottom front teeth. Very weird.

It’s the end of the bank holiday.

We’ve not been able to make the most of the long weekend because a) poor Trump’s been really under the weather, and b) the weather’s been under the weather.

In terms of types of weather that really get on my tits, strong wind is top of the shop. I hate it, it puts me in a very BAD MOOD. It’s been extremely windy since Friday, it’s still windy today, so although it’s not rained, I’ve not wanted to leave the house.

Roasted
I made a roast dinner last night, so ignoring my own two pan rule of cooking: a roast dinner involves a roasting tin; two or three pans; colander; sieve; knives; forks, etc, etc, etc. And then everything gets covered in gravy and grease that congeals over everything and then you have to wash up all the shit.

So, for the sake of 10mins eating pleasure, you get four hours of misery, plus lots of mess.

Not forgetting the smell of roasting flesh and cooking vegetables that lingers for days. At least we didn’t have cauliflower. I hate cauliflower with my roast dinner – stinks the house out and you get little floaty bits of the stuff in your gravy.

Gravy MUST remain untainted by things that can mix with it, hence mashed potato is an absolute no-no. Broccoli isn’t much better, but if you don’t cook it for too long, you can get away with it.

The thing is, I love cauliflower so long as it’s either pickled or cheesy. Any other format is incompatible with my palate.

What I really want
I’m looking for a headboard bookcase for Bellend Towers. A what? A this sort of thing:

Not that particular one, but you get the picture. Imagine all the cool things you could put on there though: coffee; tissues; books; this, that, the other; dust, lots of dust.

Now, either the Americans are WAY ahead of the rest of the world, or they’re completely naff and bookcase headboards are totally un-with-it, whatever, you can’t get these things in the UK, at all, anywhere.

Anyway, I can’t get one, so I’m pissed off. I think Trump is pleased that they can’t be sourced over here. I might try to make one.

Virgin cock-up
Apparently, Virgin should’ve told my folks that they’d no longer be able to get the internet through their telly box, so the customer services woman told me when I phoned up to activate the broadband on the new box today.

For compensation, they’re coming to install a modem at the weekend and they’re upgrading them to 4MB for £7 a month less.

Check this out
Found this on the Bellend Homes website.

The canal doesn’t look that good from inside the house, what with the floating milk bottles and takeaway boxes, but you get the picture.

The beauty of V+ is that you can record things months ago and not realise you have them until you check through what you have stored and there it is.

I have the last three episodes of the first series of Heroes on there and I recently had the great pleasure of watching the first series of Ashes to Ashes over the course of a week – much better than waiting for the next episode. I’m currently watching Black Christmas, a 1974 horror film in which a murderous stalker gets into a sorority house and picks off the housemates while phoning them, threatening to eat out their pussies. Oh dear, somebody else has just bought it, courtesy of a big hook on a pulley in the attic….

I love cable TV, I love my V+ box and I’m really going to miss it when we move (we have to go to satellite because we’re going to a non-cable area). But anyway, they’re all much of a muchness I suppose.

I keep trying to persuade my parents to upgrade to V+, but they don’t want the hassle of easy to use programming, series recording, pausing and rewinding live telly. Instead, they wanted to stick to their old cable box that took ten seconds to respond to a key press. That was until Virgin phoned them to tell them they were going to post them a new box and, if they were OK fitting it, it’d save having to book the job – there’d be telephone support, etc.

I went to install it this afternoon, a simple task that involved:

1. Pulling the telly out from the corner of the room
2. Fighting with 500m of various entangled cables in order to unplug the old box
3. Getting covered in dust and fluff from the dark recesses of the corner of doom
4. Trying to persuade Little Con (awww, she’s walking now, you know) to go to her mum instead of trying to kiss the men on the telly
5. Plugging the new box in
6. Waiting for something to happen

All this time, I had Big Con telling me that I needed to take the serial number from the old box.

Stress levels rising, I blew the dust from my nose and washed it from my hands and told Big Con that the next stage was to phone Virgin to activate the new box.

“But there’s nothing on the telly”, she questioned me

“That’s because you need to activate the new box, phone them up.”

She did, and got through to a Scottish assistant. Even getting past the security questions was a trauma.

“I need to speak to the account holder [my dad], can you put them on so they can give their authorisation for you?”

My dad can’t understand English, let alone Scottish accents, I knew we were in for trouble, but I think the woman realised she’d be better dealing with Connie.

We waited for the telly to start doing something: blank screen. Waited some more: blank screen. Waited, waited, waited.

After half an hour, I told Mum to phone them back. It was the same woman she’d spoken to previously.

“Can you verify the account number, your name, password, address and postcode? Can you put the account holder on to authorise you to do this?”

Fuck.

“I’ll send a stronger signal through, don’t touch anything”

What she meant by this was “I was too off my tits on smack to be bothered to press the button when you phoned earlier, I’ll do it now, for fuck’s sake, but I’ll phone back in ten minutes to check it’s OK”.

The telly came back on straight away, but not the film channels. When she phoned back, Mum (getting VERY stressed now), told her about the film channels not coming up.

“Oh, the new box has a different PIN”

“BUT THE INPUT FOR THE PIN ISN’T THERE!!!!!”

“I’ll transfer you”

Another Scottish man “You’re PIN’s changed because it’s a new box”

“I KNOW, BUT THERE’S NOWHERE TO ENTER THE PIN!!!!”

(My brother was also here at this point, helpfully saying that you should be able to take off the requirement for a PIN in the settings.

“No you can’t, IT’S SET BY THE NETWORK!”

“At least they’re in Britain, I can’t stand it when they put you through to India, you can’t understand them”

“I can understand them better from India than from Scotland”

“I’m going to change my password to ‘all muslims are evil'”

“That’s nice, what about all the Christians being evil too? Besides, if you’re put through to Bombay, they’re likely to agree with you about muslims because they’re probably Hindus”, fucking tool)

“Hang on, I’ll transfer you”

The line went dead, then the automated options started, mum started talking to them, and then got through to somebody in India.

“Can I have you account number please madam?”

Fuck.

FUCK!

Anyway, the Scottish man must have done something and everything turned out nice again. Until Mum noticed that the films were cut off top and bottom because theirs isn’t a widescreen telly.

“The other box didn’t do that, I’m going to go back to the other one, I can’t COPE with that black screen at the top and bottom of the picture.”

No, but you can cope with a shite old telly box that takes four fucking hours to change the bastard channel, can you? CAN YOU???

And I left my cocking housekeys there. Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks.

Trump has bought a ukulele.

What did I get? A new vacuum cleaner and this month’s Vanity Fair.

Oh and a whippy ice cream.

I wish my facial hair would take the hint and not come back once plucked out You put yourself through the discomfort of actually pulling a hair out, why does it grow back?

Come dine with me
There’s a programme on the telly called “Come dine with me“: five strangers take it in turns to host a dinner party, on which their guests score them, the one with the highest score at the end of the week wins a thousand pounds.

God, some people are cocks. The current episode is set in Leeds. There’s a total cunt of a woman called Pippa who thinks she’s gorgeous (she commissioned a nude portrait of herself) and a “wine student”. Vile woman even locked out a guest because they arrived ten minutes early. Her idea of fine dining was to have her guests eat in the conservatory, sat on garden furniture rather than proper chairs. Her dining table is strewn with rose petals, she’s wearing a tiara.

Horrid people, the lot of them.

There are some programmes where I find myself spitting expletives for their entirety. This is one of them.

How would Sniffy play it? Something cooked in two pans with a pudding from Tesco. No booze. And then they can all piss off out of my house.

Trump has been slightly concerned that, moving to Rochdale, we’ll be leaving behind our cosmopolitan lifestyle (yes, in Levenshulme), or perhaps she means bohemian. For all its faults, Levenshulme has three things going for it:

1. Proximity to the city and work (for me)
2. Village stores on the corner
3. Isis cafe

And that is it.

However, Trump feels that we might be rather conspicuous as a gay couple in the suburbs and she might be right. Will the only gays be hounded out? I think most people just keep themselves to themselves these days and don’t really bother about their neighbours so long as they don’t piss them off. I’ve been warned.

Anyway, Trump went to do the snagging visit at Bellend Towers this afternoon. It turned out to be a full training session on how to use everything in the house (I knew I should’ve gone with her), but she happened to meet the neighbours. We’d seen one bloke there on a couple of occasions – he has two dogs – and this afternoon, Trump met his boyfriend.

Cheers to queers!

Turkey breast
I bought a new lady shave today. The other one bust and things were getting out of hand in my ladygarden. It had reached the point where I might have been asked to produce a licence for my trouser pet. Anyway, anyway, I finally tackled my unruly bush, but I think I went a bit too far and I’ve been left with something that looks like the badly plucked breast of a ginger turkey.

It’ll grow back.

Cleansed
Rather than going to the GP to get my chronic sinus problem sorted, I decided to go to Ebay NHS Trust and seek treatment for my blocked tubes. I found this:

This is a “neti pot”. What you do is dissolve some of the Sinucleanse solution (sodium chloride and bicarbonate of soda) in lukewarm tapwater, then shove the spout up one nostril, tilt your head, breathe through your mouth let gravity do its thing – the solution goes in one nostril and out the other, thus:

Insert

Tilt

Flow

Does it work? Well, I have been feeling slightly better these past couple of days, but I still get the feeling that there’s something growing high up in one of my sinuses, so we’ll wait and see. I always have a desire to stick a probe up my nose and have a good poke about to see what I can pull out. But in terms of entertainment, this is brilliant and everyone should try it.

Next week, Sniffy provides a step by step presentation of her high colonic irrigation.

Most of the things I cook involve two pans: one for cooking something in boiling salted water (pasta, rice); one for cooking a sauce (curry, chilli, bolognese, etc). Most of the things I cook start with me peeling an onion.

The first act in the preparation of 80% of my main meals gets me really, really annoyed.

Onions. They either have a tissue-thin skin that comes off in the tiniest bits, or you find that the first five layers of onion are bad and have to be removed with the skin; leaving usable onion amounting to something the size of a pickle. So then you have to peel another of the fuckers, by which time your eyes are streaming and nose is dripping.

If only the chippy wasn’t still shut. Where the hell have they gone? I really hope they weren’t on holiday in Szechuan when the earthquake hit. Then again, we’ll be moving soon anyway, so it won’t matter whether they’re dead in a hellish nightmare of a natural disaster.

And, back to peelings, is there an easy way to peel a hard boiled egg? There must be some method to getting the shells off without digging your nails into the eggy whiteness; it doesn’t lend itself to good presentation. Or hygiene.

Heathens in hot places
Very hot places, in fact. It seems that Kenya has a problem with witchcraft and this makes people think they have the right to burn elderly people to death.

Trump’s response to seeing that was “what fucking century are we living in?”. Indeed, it seems that there increasing numbers of total fucking lunatics on this planet and, what’s even more worrying is that they tend to breed faster than the rest of us. We’ll be over-run with religious nutcases in a generation.

Cadbury’s chocolate digestives
I bought some of these last night, thinking they were McVities. They’re OK in an emergency, but not as nice as McVities.