There’s a subtle click and the blue light illuminates the pre-dawn, winter darkness. The final twenty seconds of a song play out and fade to near silence, Hrrrm, your waking mind stirs into action, that song was quite good, I wonder… then “It’s FIVE THIRTY and you’re listening to 105.4 Century FM”. Jesus no, anything but that fucking awful montage of “morning songs…”

Wake up, wake up…(King in a Catholic style)… Every morning…(there’s a halo hanging from the corner of my girlfriend’s four-post bed)… Wake up, it’s a beautiful morning…(the sun’s shining for your eyes)… Here comes the sun…(little darling)… plus that other indecipherable one – what the fuck is that?

Why do they do that? As if waking up at 5.30am isn’t punishment enough without inflicting that on us poor bastards.

“Hello and good morning, this is Darren Proctor on 105.4 Century FM and I can tell you we’ve got a chilly one this morning – you’re going to have to defrost your car…” IT’S DE-ICE, YOU THICK BASTARD! “…Coming up in the next half hour, we’ve got Salty with the sport and traffic and music from Madonna, Inner City, Robbie and Ronan. But first, here’s the news headlines with Vicky.”

“Good morning, the headlines today. A gang in Manchester are being questioned after nintey grammes’ worth of heroin was seized….”

Ninety grammes’ worth? Grammes’ WORTH??? Surely you mean ninety grammes???

“Family and friends of George Best are still at his bedside….”

Ah fuck off!

You get up to have a wee and make your coffee in order to escape the insanity. And now you know what puts me in such a pleasant mood each day.

So why do I listen? Well, it’s a case of better the devil you know. You get used the extent to which a particular breakfast show gets right on your tits, so you can be prepared – God forbid, you’ll switch one day and come across a station that does wind-ups (“You’re dead right, love!”). So you stick to the same thing because the one Robbie Williams track each hour is quite enough for anyone. Plus they’re a North West-based station that covers local things that might help you on your journey to work (or give you enough evidence to persuade you to go back to bed). In all fairness, that show is actually OK and the presenters are quite good, if a little thick at times.

A winning formula
I’m sure breakfast shows on the radio have the same formula the world over: a front man and a couple of his mates (man and woman) banter through the latest “issues”, TV and celebrity gossip and throw in a bit of news, sport and weather – oh and some music if you’re lucky. They generally talk about inane crap that you’d want to throttle a colleague for engaging you about.

Today’s heated subject was “What’s the difference between cottage pie and shepherd’s pie? One’s lamb, one’s beef, but which way is it? Drop us a text or give us a bell if you know.” – you’d think one of the dishes’ names might be a clue. But no, people texted in to tell them “I don’t know”. Some bint even phoned in to say “Hiya, the difference between shepherd’s and cottage pie? I don’t know! Hee hee hee”. Now, I’m ashamed to admit it, but I couldn’t take any more. I hadn’t had any caffeine, I was very tired, very grumpy and my blood pressure was rising. I sent a text message to the station: “Shepherd’s pie is lamb, hence the name. It’s not really that difficult.”

Please forgive me.

But of course, the fucking radio station has won. The reason they do this is to wind people up so that they feel forced to send text messages at the super premium rate. It’s a revenue-generating exercise and they excel at it.

“Hiya, can you say hello…”
People who phone in to radio stations are complete fucktards. They have no social skills and are incapable of stringing words together to form coherent sentences. They are generally quite autistic too.

DP “So, Derek, what are you doing up at this time?”

Derek “Oh, you know”

DP “No, I don’t know. You up for work? Getting the kids ready for school?”

Derek: “Work, yeah”

DP: “And so, what do you do?”

Derek: “Taxi – you know, airport run and that”

Fuck’s sake. Why do these people phone in when they’ve got no intention of communicating in a meaningful manner? Is a Six O’Clock Club certificate and some free teabags really worth it?

Going national
I can’t stomach the national radio stations; the presenters are incredibly big-headed, believing they’re the most important thing in broadcasting history. They are just very boring nobodies who enjoy the sound of their own voices, who think their opinions matter. On top of the usual formula for breakfast show radio, the result is unbearable.

“You should try Radio Four”
You should try stopping being such a pretentious wanker. Radio Four is the UK’s high-brow radio station, presented by stuck up nobs. Radio Four’s idea of a fun breakfast is news, news and more news, in voices that sound like the school teacher from Charlie Brown. Radio Four does news, documentaries, the odd decent comedy, drama, shipping forecast. Radio Four does not do music, it does “Look at me, aren’t I clever, using big words that you don’t understand?” radio and it makes me sick.

Worse than Radio Four though are its listeners, who only listen so that they can come to work and say “Did you hear on Radio Four this morning,… blah, blah, blah?”. These people read The Guardian.

Perhaps my problem with Radio Four and The Guardian isn’t their respective contents, but rather the utterly unbearable people who listen and read?

Of course, some people will defend this shit with their lives.

Here at work, I’m slowly losing the will to live.

I get to Base 2a after a couple of hours at Base 2b and I can’t log on to my profile on the PC: my e-mails have finally appeared but I can’t access any of my files. Added to this, one of the lights in my office is flickering – it’s one of those fluorescent things that flashes to the point of inducing a migraine when the starter unit is playing up.

Over the top of this, Carmelita – a VERY enthusiastic member of the church choir – has obviously been to a practice last night and is today “pom, pom pomming” through the day, while arranging booking for the coach to the carol service at the cathedral. She’s now going through the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marples and comparing her more comic style to the dramatic protrayal given by Joan Hickson. We’re currently on “Murder at the Gallop”, but did you know there was also a “Murder Ahoy!”? Well, you do now. And David Suchet really is excellent at Poirot.

In the half hour that I’ve been here, all the ladies have been weighed; “I was really good all last week up to the weekend and yesterday…”. We’ve covered how our pensions are panning out (if we’re approaching retirement age) and also mortgaging property to see us through retirement. A very important message has come through to tell us to put our used crockery and cutlery into the dishwasher and NOT to leave it in the sink or on the side. That’ll be another laminated sign going up – they LOVE their laminated notices here, there are twenty covering the reception window and each toilet cubicle has a “Please flush the toilet after use” sign.

Oh, and the book man has brought our books.

Let us all rejoice.

La-la, lah lah, pom, pom pom pom POOOOOOMMMMMMM!!!!

We’re all dead.

The strange noises we hear, the weird happenings we attribute to “The Others” are actually occurrences caused by the every day lives of living folk who’ve moved into our homes.

Or it could be the neighbours being inconsiderate, noisy cunts again.

For the past three days, large parts of Britain have been seeing a lot of this:

No, not trees, fog.

I don’t mind the fog; from being a child, it has always held an eerie mystery for me – particularly the way in that, when I was very young, a bad fog would be guaranteed to give you really black bogies because of all the soot and other airborne pollution back then.

Driving through the stuff isn’t much fun, but it’s generally OK so long as you follow simple rules – put your lights on, keep your distance and don’t speed. Put your lights on. Simple enough really, but you tend to find that drivers, of silver and grey cars in particular, seem oblivious to the fact that you can’t seem them in poor weather unless they have theirs on. Stupid cocks.

Put your lights on. I don’t know why I did it, but having found them useful the other night, I decided to put my front fog lamps on for the journey home this evening. Now, these are the least-used lights on the car, so why is it that one of them only works for 14 minutes before the bulb goes? Fucking annoying piece of shit!

It was such a friggin’ palaver replacing that same bulb less than a year ago. First off I had to pick the right one from Halfords, then Trillion’s feller didn’t half get a cold bum taking the exisitng one out before realising the the guide had been mistaken and I’d bought the wrong one. Such a mither for him to go to Halfords to exchange the bloody thing and then for him to crawl about under the bloody car to replace it. I was worn out watching him.

And now the fucking thing’s gone again. It put me in such a bad mood driving home because I could just sense all the friggin “Look at me, with two functional fog lights” bastards looking at my filthy, handicapped car and gloating to themselves.

Thawing, defrosting, deicing
It may seem hard to believe, but some things get right on my tits. I’m no expert in English, but I get by and I know that you:

• Thaw a frozen biological sample
• Defrost a frozen chicken
• Deice the car

You do NOT, contrary to what the fucking numpties on my local radio station insist on repeating, you do NOT NOT NOT defrost your fucking car in the bastard morning you stupid thick cunt! I’m not one for texting in to people, but I’m so bloody close to telling those twats at “105.4 Century FM” to stop telling people they’ll have to defrost their fucking cars. Makes my blood boil. Actually, that particular presenter is OK, but I don’t think I’ll be able to take another morning of their stupidity.

Wonder if radio and TV stations’ media people and legal teams check the web to see what’s being written about them? I fucking hope so! They can go back to bloody Darren Proctor and tell him what a nob he’s being.

“This hardware will work faster through a USB 2 port”
I’m sure it will, but I haven’t got one, so this’ll have to do.

Windows XP is a bit clever. When you first set it up, it scans your hardware for all your PC’s components, then registers that component profile with Microsoft. What on earth for? Well, it’s so that copy of Win XP can only be used with the one computer. The consequence of this is, that after 5 component changes, it won’t recognise further additions to the system since it sees the whole thing as a new computer.

Fucking bastards.

So yes, my camera may well download and work a lot faster through a USB 2 connection, but if you think I’m losing one of my 5 fucking lives over it, you can go ninnies.

Meatball marinara
What the hell is a marinara sauce? My limited Italian tells me it should be something seafoody or fishy, but that would be pretty disgusting with meatballs. Somebody please explain.

Actually, I don’t really give a shit. My mum (72 today!) makes the best meatballs on the planet so you can keep your fishy crap on your Subway because I don’t want to know.

I think that’ll do for now.

And yes Rowan, I love to feed the ducks.

Are parties any good?

As far as gatherings of lots of different people go, they’re OK. There’s some sort of common denominator that means all the guests should be relatively safe. So it’s relatively OK to leave your coat unattended (but not your cans of pop or bottles of booze) without fear of anything going missing from the pockets.

But there are always worries about going out to that sort of thing: who’ll be there; what time do I get there; what time can I leave; will there be food; will the toilet paper run out; is there a toilet; will I end up in a fight?

Of course, the apprehensions about partying in our thirties are a lot different to how they were in our late teens and early twenties.

• Food was never a worry because parties didn’t start until the pubs closed, so you’d have had your tea and perhaps some crisps and pork scratchings to line your stomach prior to the final leg of the alcoholic onslaught. There may be some crisps.
• What not to wear. While other girls would spend hours choosing their outfits and getting dolled up, I would just put on whatever fit (I was having a ten year growth spurt). Jeans and a top for me.
• What do you talk about? Fuck only knows, I have no idea what sort of things we talked about back then. Probably the same shit we talk about today, only less informed/scarred by disappointment and failure.
• Getting off. I dreaded the idea of anybody making advances towards me, I just wasn’t interested (I know why now). However, back then, as now, the last thing you wanted was to become the subject of all the gossip when you got back to college on the Monday. Fuck that. We’ll talk about the mud stains on Paula Ashton’s knees and the smile on her boyfriend’s face instead. Or spend hours using a process of elimination to try to figure out who was having sex in the bathroom while Derys and Craig were shagging in the armchair.
• When to stop. You don’t know when to stop drinking, so you drink until there’s only the dregs of a bottle of Taboo left.
• How to get home. You tended to sleep where you dropped, or stumble to a mate’s house where they’d provided a bed (and a bucket) for the night.

My main worries about going to parties these days are: will there be enough food; what time can I leave; should finally get round to telling these people that I’m queer?

Running buffet
Get that foil off so we can see what we’ve got! I love a running buffet. Essential items are:

• Chicken drumsticks
• Slices of ham and/or chicken
• Seafoody stuff – prawns, smoked salmon, tuna
• Bread rolls
• Pickles
• Sausages (on or off sticks, I’m not fussy)
• Cheese (crackers)
• Sausage rolls and mini pork pies
• Vol au vents (chicken & mushroom and prawn cocktail)
• Crisps
• Puddings

Would like in an ideal buffet

• A selection of fine pates, salamis and parma ham
• Continental cheeses drizzled with good olive oil (mozzarella ticolore, frexample)
• Varieties of olives
• Haywards continental mixed pickle and piccalilli
• Aubergine and feta involtine
• Tuna fish and onion sandwiches
• April’s smoked salmon and Canadian dill pickles

Non-essential items

• Crudetes: high fat, high salt, that’s what buffets are all about. Any fresh fruit or veg should be forgotten about, unless you want to go mad and do some garnish.
• Baked potatoes: nice, but not essential (and they have to be cooked to within an inch of their lives). Baked potatoes should be reserved for a different type of buffet, mixing the two constitutes unnecessary effort on the part of those preparing the feast and on the punters who have to make room to eat them.
• Dips: nah, they’re shit
• Quiche: fuck off. Quiche is one of those things that is just a wobbly, soggy, tasteless eggy thing. Get it out of my buffet and get some vol au vents out there instead.

What time can I leave?
It’s OK now that I don’t drink because, unless I’m giving some pissheads a lift and I have to wait for them to finish “just another bottle of wine”, I can leave when I like. Last night, I was ready to leave at 9.30 when my last can of pop had been stolen, but I stuck it out until 11.30 (quite good for me) when my contact lenses started failing dramatically. The consequence of this was that I kept blinking and winking at people and I didn’t want to give anybody the wrong idea (especially the bloke who looked like a sex offender).

Out
Nah.

Of course, the good thing about being older is that I have (at last) the confidence to be such a flirt with the blokes, knowing that I’ve no intention of taking things further and that they can’t because they’re married. In fact, I flirt with everybody, but the women don’t notice; too busy worrying about makeup and kids and that I reckon – nothing to do with me being crap at flirting or them being straight or owt.

When you go to a house party, it’s tradition to take some booze or other drink to add to the collection. The hosts will have been generous enough in providing food, music and space for the gathering, so it’s only fair that the guests take their own drinks with them.

THEIR OWN DRINKS, not forgetting DRINKS FOR THEIR FUCKING KIDS!

I’m completely fucked off with going to parties, taking my six (or twelve) cans of pop and having most of them nicked by frigging kids whose parents don’t think to take anything for them to drink. It happened again tonight and I had run out of drinks by 9pm.

Of course, the boozers are fine because there are 500 cans of Stella, Guinness, Carlsberg plus assorted spirits and wines. The only other soft drinks are either dead cheap cola or warm full fat Coca Cola, orange juice, bitter lemon or squash.

Bastards.

I had it out with my friend, whose step son had taken a couple of my cans for him and another kid.

“Well, there’s Diet Coke there”

“But I don’t like Diet Coke, that’s why I brought my own pop. Why didn’t Reece have the Diet Coke?”

“Because he prefers to drink out of cans.”

“Well, if you know that, why didn’t you bring some cans instead of a big bottle of Diet Coke? This happens every time there’s one of these gatherings; I end up providing the pop for all the kids because the parents don’t think about bringing drinks for them. It’s not on!”

Anyway, I was firm, but not quite as arsey that makes me sound. And at least I didn’t have 3/4 of a bottle of Absolut Vodka, or 8 bottles of fine Belgian beer nicked.

You get these fuckers who go to parties and take cheap shit with them and drink all the good stuff that other people fork out good money for. Wankers.

A bit of privacy, please?
And there was this bloke there who had a video camera; he was panning the room, but he was concentrating the shot on people’s conversations. He stopped at me, just at the point where I’d been going to say something about one of the guests looking like a kiddie fiddler. That would’ve been a nice keepsake. I just gave him the subtle “Vs” in the Peter Kay styleee instead. Fucking tit.

An offer too good to accept
But it was a great do (a surprise 40th) and I enjoyed seeing my mates again for the first time in a year. There’ve been opportunities to catch up in the intervening period since Peter’s legendary “Hot Pot supper” last autumn, but I’ve not been able to, or been arsed to go.

In their own ways, each of my friends in that groups means something a little different to me. We all share common memories, for example, the last time I was in that house was 17 years ago and the party was VERY different to the one that took place this evening. We’d have all been in our late teens, it was fancy dress, and there was even a couple having sex in an armchair and also in the bathroom.

What’s not changed in that time is my soft spot for my friend, I’ve held a torch for her for years. So when her hubby, who I ADORE (he is also one of the gang from way back) asked if I’d like to lodge with them, all sorts of things crossed my mind. You can’t justify moving in with somebody when you know you fancy them. That is wrong. But how do you explain that? I could just say, “Well, I might find it hard to control myself”, and they’d assume I meant him.

It could be fun…. but it’s probably not a good idea.

A message for Michael
Poor Michael dropped by here and happened to find the “Sam Black” cuntathon post. Sorry Michael, that was unusual for here. Not the cuntathon, the shitty attempt at fiction.

Today marks the beginning of a new chapter in the life of yours truly (it is truly, isn’t it?). Today I held in my tiny little baby hands*:

The Mystical Celtic Cross Stone

It has reached the end of its epic journey; a journey that has spanned millennia, and it has finally found its rightful and very mystical home, here in the dark land of Salfordia.

Accompanied by runic scripture documenting its mythical history, a magical spell revealed the hidden caveat that the Stone’s power must only used for good deeds (fuck!).

The Stone’s journey to the magical land of Salfordia took so long because it shrouds itself from those it knows would abuse its power. On thinking the wicked acts of revenge that I could use the Stone’s powers for in my battle of wills against the wrongdoers in the parish, it disguised itself cunningly as a lump of cheese:

The Voice in my head told me, “Use only good to fight evil. Good must win”.

That’s a bit fucking boring if you ask me, but the Stone’s will must be done and I’ll have to be more creative with my interpretation of “good”.

So, the task for the People is to tell me, The Keeper: What good deeds would you like the Stone’s power to be used for?

*Hand it over
I wonder if CCE has good personal hygiene standards, or whether I’ll have to scrub my hands every time I’ve touched the thing. I’m sure I’ll be fine. But isn’t this a cause for concern when you buy second hand books, or borrow books from a library? You never know what the previous owners or readers have been doing prior to fingering the pages.

Just a thought.

You know the type of things you see advertised with crap 1950s-style black & white diagrams in the Sunday papers, or those daft little catalogues that accompany them? Well for Sam Black, it all started with an order for a set of orthopaedic insoles and went downhill from there.

Part the first: Would like to meet?
Sam had always suffered from knee and shin problems while walking and saw the advert for Dr Foot’s magic sports insoles as a godsend. Not trusting the security in online shopping, she’d phoned up Your Health Solutions of Manchesterford to place her order and regretted her decision as soon as the sales operative started trying to sell her other items from the Your Health range.

“Many of our customers find the adjustable hernia belt most useful and we do a roaring trade in incontinence products. Not to mention our back-support girdles…”

“No, I’ll be fine with the shoe supports,” she interrupted, “although I may bear those other things in mind when I’m a bit older.”

Immediately, she bit her lip, knowing the response her this statement would invite from the youthful-sounding man on the phone.

“Yes, of course madam, I was letting my enthusiasm for our products run away with me. You don’t sound much older than me. In fact, you don’t live too far from where I am, do you go out much in Manchesterford?”

Oh fuck, she thought.

“No, not really, I’m stuck in the house at the moment, I’m waiting for my motorised scooter to be repaired. And I never have been one for going out, what with the embarrassing way I react to being in open spaces.”

“Oh, OK then madam, it’s been nice talking to you. Your items will be delivered within the next couple of days”.

Sam hated lying, but she couldn’t be doing with being chatted up on the phone by another stranger. While she was on the run from her past, the best way to maintain her anonymity was to stay away from all unnecessary interaction. She couldn’t be doing with crazed policemen or circus freaks again, never again. Besides, the clown makeup brought her out in spots and the wig made her head itch. Her head spun for a couple more minutes and then her anxieties subsided enough to allow her a good session of pelvic floor exercises; they were bound to start helping sooner or later.

Part the second: Getting to know you
A few days had gone by and she’d almost forgotten that she’s ordered her Dr Foot sports support insoles. As she jogged round the corner towards her house though, the stabbing pain returned to her shins and she was forced to slow down to a walk. I wonder if those insoles will work, she thought as she opened her gate and walked towards her front door. She was surprised to see a young man waiting for her, he was holding a package. His hair was stuck to his head with gel or grease, he was hopelessly long-sighted, but at least his acne was clearing up. Sam wondered whether, in his early twenties, this chap’s mum still chose his clothes.

“Good morning madam,” he greated her, “I’ve got a parcel for a Sam Black. I’ve tried knocking, but there’s no reply. Can you help?”

“Oh, that’s my husband,” such a convenient name at times, “he’s just behind me, he likes to run little further than me so he’s doing an extra block. I can take that if you like.”

“Sam’s a man?”

“Yerrssss, Sam’s my husband”

“Oh, it’s just that when I spoke to Sam the other night, when I took the order, Sam was a woman.”

Jesus, it was the bloke off the phone… him from Your Health, the one she’d lied to about not being able to get about. FUCK!

“You see,” he continued, “I thought, hang Data Protection! It’d be nice to drop things round in person to see how you were getting along. Sam! But you had to LIE, didn’t you? SAM?? eh, SAM????“

He started spitting and twitching, if it hadn’t been so scary, it would have been hilarious!

She quelled the instinct to burst out laughing at him and thought of something that might calm the situation.

“Yes, Sam, that’s me too and my husband is called Sam. What’s your name?”

“IaaannnnnnnNNN!” he glared at her.

Part the third: Partings are such sweet sorrow
“Well Ian, you see there was an amazing miracle. I won the lottery and went to see a vey expensive doctor about my condition. I paid him lots of money and he cured me! So here I am! Cured! Ha ha ha ha”

“Really? That’s wonderful! You’re very lucky. Here’s your package, would you mind signing please? Thanks then, bye!”

So that was that. She watched as he wandered off down the road and wondered how it was possible to have so many spots visible in a hair parting.

Damn, she thought, I think I did a little pee when Ian rumbled me. I’ll have to get something that will help prevent embarrassing moments like that in the future.

(Don’t ask, just don’t ask)

How brilliant are ducks?

And sheep, for that matter.

Say hello to Rusty Cock

Rusty belongs to the anonymous commenter formerly known as Trillion. He went to live with her last Christmas after being given as a pressie by yours truly (or is it faithfully or sincerely?).

Anyway, during a conversation with Trillion this evening, she rumbled me and figured that I’d purchased “Rusty Cock 2 – The Daddy” for one of her Christmas presents. There’s nothing like keeping Christmas special I suppose. RC2 didn’t have any bar code or price so I had to ask at the till (T K Maxx) where I begged the young lad to ask his supervisors for a pricecheck on a “12” rusty cock”. He opted instead for “It’s not very big… no, no more than ten, maybe twelve inches. No not as big as that, it’s quite small actually”.

Not-so secret Santa
I love where I work at Base 2a. The entire NHS depends on the people there and EVERYTHING is so very, very important. To the point that every single point of discussion has to be bled dry in two to three hour heated debates. I’m talking serious things here: latest Aldi bargains; holidays; what’s on the menu at the canteen.

I turned up today to find that only two people were left to be chosen for the Christmas gift thing, I made my choice. “Oh good”, I said, dying inside.

You see, in normal workplaces where they do this sort of thing, you either choose in secret, so that nobody knows who is buying for whom, or everybody just buys a pressie to a certain value and people pick something out of the – I called it a tumbledryer earlier – tomboler. Anonymity is key. Here, however, everybody knows who is buying whose present. This is all part of the anti personnel psychological warfare that is ingrained in the culture there. It automatically takes the fun out of the entire exercise because you can’t buy racy pressies, or things that are a bit close to the knuckle, or remotely humorous. The presents that are exchanged are generally very safe, very tedious things. Let’s face it, if you’re going to get something that you don’t want, it might as well be rude and tasteless, rather than just tasteless tat.

“Oh good”, I said, dying inside.

The second my victim discovered that I’d the one buying their present, they swooped and stood in the doorway of my office, trapping me there.

“I hear you’re buying my Christmas present. I’m really very easy to buy for…”

Not as easy to buy for if you didn’t know it was coming from me… “Yeah, just jot down two or three things that you’d like and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Really, I’m not at all fussy, I’m very easy to buy for.”

Jesus, this is the person who’s taken 4 weeks to decide on which digital camera to buy from a choice of one… “Oh good, yeah, that’s great. It’s better if I get you something that you’d like. Just write down two or three things that you might like…”

“Yeah, the only thing I don’t really use are books. I don’t really read books, so cookery books or gardening books wouldn’t really be any use. But I’m very easy to buy for, so toiletries and jewellery, anything like that is great.”

Fu-king-hell, please stop the screaming, the pain is killing me… Jewellery for a tenner? You having a fucking laugh??? You’ll get a Dove selection box from Boots like every other fucker! “Oh, that’s fine, we’ll get you sorted, don’t worry.”

Berrrlimey! Harmless, nice, decent people, but not my cuppa tea.

No brainer
Apparently, they’re also called “bran tubs”, where you put all the pressies into a big tub and pick one out. Bran tub, why’s that then? Bran…

I had Trillion explain “no-brainer” to me earlier too. You hear it loads: “Well, it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?” Eh? What you mean with this “no-brainer”? I no understand. “Like you don’t need a brain to understand or to make a decision”.

Why’s that then? Of course you need a brain to understand, dickhead.

You know what I mean? At the end of the day, err basically, it’s a no-brainer.

Fuck.

So, that’s Trillion’s surprise ruined; it wasn’t cheap either. And to think I was going to get her a Toby jug gravy boat with the face of Robbie Williams. No-brainer, really.

Santa Claus is coming to town
Already here in the Sniffy household, where the residents are so happy, it really is like Christmas every day!

Bollocks to that.

For some reason, I was singing “Santa claus is coming to town” earlier. Max had been whinging at me and it just started: “You’d better not shout, you’d better not cry….”

“SAAAAAAAAAAAANTA Claus is coming to town – oh yeah!”

I never say Santa Claus, it’s Father Christmas as far as I’m concerned.

And of course, I was singing a hybrid of all the popular versions of the song, which a bit odd, considering the weird tempo of the Jackson 5 rendition. Of course, the one version that I didn’t incoporate was Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen’s. This is so dreafully awful and un-Christmassy that it’s analagous to the gratey-throated union man coming round to your house on Christmas day, shagging your mum, killing your dad, slitting the cats’ throats and shitting on the turkey.

No, no, no! It’d be like fucking Coldplay doing “Last Christmas” or Travis coming out with “All I want for Christmas is you”. It’s just WRONG! But it can’t be wiped from our memories, can it? Bruce Springsteen has effectively ruined Christmas.

Thanks Bossman, you utter twat.

I can’t believe I’ve done a post about Christmas already. I might do a Sniffy Advent Calendar, with each day representing another joyous occurrance, meeting or coming to blows in my run up to my Christmas dinner.

Obsessed with being an obsessive and ever eager to discover the wherabouts of readers, imagine my delight when I found this:

The main point of interest here is the referring page and the method by which the hapless reader from Augusta, Georgia stumbled across this blog. The question to which they searched for an answer was:

“Where can I find various types of cakes?”

Call me old fashioned, but your first point of call would generally be one of these things known as a “bakers and confectioners”. Bugger only knows what they found by dropping in here.

“Yeah, if you go down to Athens, GA, and you’re driving in your car, you won’t get very far before you hear people shouting out!” I tribute there to the wonderful people of the great state of Georgia.

Oh, and next door’s washing was STILL out this morning. It must bloody stink and need rewashing by the time they get it in. I mean, just what on earth do they do all day? Surely they must have just one spare minute to bring it in between filling out benefit claim forms and eating chips?? Can people be prosecuted for being criminally stupid? They fucking should be!