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.

We had to go to Tesco this afternoon. Needing a paper shredder, we figured it’d be better if we went to a Tesco Extra (wider range of stock) so we headed off to the big one in Portwood.

I don’t know what it is about this particular store, but it just drains me of my will to live; me and Trump always end up getting into a strop there too. This usually happens at the fruit and veg section, but today, tempers started to rise by the time we got to shampoo. By the time I got to fruit and veg, I wanted to kill. I wanted to kill everybody.

The fruit and veg section is never helped by a lot of aisle space being taken up by cages being left all over the place, but the people who dawdle and make passage from one end to the other absolutely impossible. And it’s not even worth thinking about actually trying to pick up any veg because of peoples’ trolleys blocking the shelves.

Today, my progress was blocked by the entire width of the aisle being filled with people, trolleys, children, walking at 0.2 miles per year. Why aren’t you allowed to run at them really quickly and ram a trolley into the backs of their legs?

And then there are the children: pushing trolleys (sideways); walking alongside their parents, taking up space; standing in the way; screaming; breathing.

Fuck.

The only compensation is knowing that I don’t have to go home with the little shits.

Cilantro is what the Americans call the leaf of the coriander plant – it makes sense and saves confusion between the green bit and the seeds.

Coriander leaf is a major component of Asian and Oriental cooking, it adds a pungent, fragrant flavour to dishes that I really enjoy. I love coriander, but coriander doesn’t like me!

Apparently, coriander is an aphrodisiac (weh-hey!), but also a laxative (ah). I must admit that I’ve never experienced its aphrodisiac effects, but I often fall victim to its laxative properties. Yes, I love curries, but I find that within an hour or so of finishing, my guts start churning…

… and then I shit myself.

Without fail.

Annoying eh?

People who understand databases are weird
I’m trying to write a simple database. I can’t do it. I think people who understand databases can also do cryptic crosswords. In fact, the workings of a database must be something akin to Lyra’s alethiometer in the Dark Materials trilogy: lots of different overlapping planes of information all linked by jiggery-pokery and squinting.

Bah!

Bover?
I said I’d mow my parents’ lawn tomorrow. Groan. Of course, Bell-end Towers has a lawn, and this means we’ll have to buy a mower. But the choice! I’m inclined to go for a hover mower, simply because it feels like you’re mowing the lawn with a space ship – how cool is that?

Something like this wouldn’t be any good because it it’d be too big to get into the corners of lawn and it doesn’t have a grass collector.

Rocky’s beard is a bit long.

That’s him with his seatbelt on

When he got shaved the other month, the only things to survive were his eyebrows and beard. The rest of his fur has grown back, and his beard jest kept on growing too.

Him having a long beard wouldn’t normally present a problem, but we’ve gone back to Gravy Bites for his dinners, which he loves. He uses the gravy to condition his beard:

Goo!

It’s like having a little furry leper in the house after he’s had his tea; both of us try to avoid him, prevent him from coming near us and smearing his tripiness on us.

At least he’s not a toddler – they’re always full of snot and slobber and stickiness. Manky little bastards. I’m sure that between the ages of 8 months and 5 years, all children constantly have snot dribbles on their top lips. Disgusting.

I fail to see the attraction in them.

How do I tell my sister??? As much as I love my little niece, it makes me feel a bit queezy to go near her; she’s had a cold and terrible bogies since she started nursery in November.

Children: disease-carrying parasites or bringers of joy and pensions?

Cold

After a couple of weeks of lovely warm weather, it’s gone quite nippy again. Brrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Things are exciting!

Me and Trump signed the contract for Bellend Towers today. Trump’s already bought a house, I’ve never done this before; it feels a bit odd, but great. A little place for us and our menagerie (and menorrhoea) up in Rochdale, away from the ghetto and towards greenery.

We have a canal running outside our front door. It’s the same canal that runs into Manchester, to Canal Street where the queers are. In the other direction, it runs to Todmorden and Hebden Bridge, where there are even more queers – it’s where lesbians go to let their toe hair grow and retire in Camper sandals and camper vans.

I’m considering buying a jet-ski to get to work. Although a scooter might be more economical and less damp.

Bellend Towers has three places to wee (not including the canal or kitchen sink), two to poo (we’re not allowing solids in the downstairs lav). This is a little excessive I feel, especially since there are only two of us and we never allow visitors, but hey, that’s modern homes for you.

Everything is beige. I can live with this, although it is rather like living in a tub of margarine. We didn’t choose the light fittings (then again, we don’t have to pay for them either) and we have a huge fuck-off, twelve-lamp, chandelier in the main bedroom. That’ll be nice, having our retinas blown out by having that put on first thing in the morning.

How did we come about acquiring this property? Well here’s how to do it:

1. Put your house on the market, but get fed up of not being able to sell it because you’re trying to sell in an area where only total idiots seem to want to buy;
2. Happen up new developments in the same area where you were looking to buy, decide to check out Persimmon’s coach houses;
3. Drive to Rochdale;
4. Find development, drive in, wander into sales office and look bemused at the house types: “Don’t you have two types of coach house?”
5. Encounter Carole, the shortest, yet most powerful saleswoman on the planet, “No, just the one, well, the foundation’s only just gone down, but it’s a belting property”
6. “Oh, we thought you had two types…. Oh hang on, we were looking at Persimmon, this is Bellway! But oh, right, you do part exchanges do you?”
7. Find out that we can’t a part ex for a coach house, “But go and have a look at a Hamilton, it’ll show you the build quality and kind of finishes we do. Check out Plot 9”
8. “…Hrrrm, this is actually quite nice, and with the part ex and discounts….”

Two months later and we’re almost moved in. I think I’ve signed all that I need to, I might go on holiday and leave Trump to do the packing and moving.

I started my new job today. It’s nice. My new boss had a jiddy fit. It was OK.