One Of The World's Most Hideous Creatures

If a picture paints a thousand words then, in the case of this alleged woman, I am sure you can fill in numbers 1 to 977 yourself but 978 to 1,000 must be "this loud, vacuous, unfunny, self-obsessed, horse-faced piece of detritus who is now reduced to doing shite adverts just has to go to Grantham."

The Human Sponge

Ever had one of those days when, no matter how polite you are to people, they just insist on being snappy, rude or simply an arse in return - even people you thought were pals?
Well, I'm having one today so anyone who has yet to insult me can have a go here. In the meantime I am just going to soak it all up before taking my revenge on a cruel world.
Do your worst!

He's Gotta Go.

Well, it's who I think he really is!

My injury and resultant incapacity (see previous post) have left me a little less light hearted, cheery and tolerant than normal. That, coupled with me having more access to the Devil's Lantern than is healthy, has brought about a deep loathing of a character who features all too frequently on our screens.
His name is Josh, he is a young boy and, contrary to the way children are supposed to be, he is heard and not seen.
This little shit features in one of those dreadful ads for Picture Loans, a commercial which itself has previously been a target of this blog. It's the one where that cow-eyed, vacant, Geordie bint takes advantage of the convenience of a phone call to sign away her life, home and family to Picture.
She smiles inanely and chats to the loan shark on the other end of the line like a long lost friend, pausing only briefly to tell her husband to fuck off when he enters the room to inform her that the house is on fire, or something. She pauses on a number of other occasions, however, and that is where the devil child Josh comes in.
Josh, we are led to believe, is her young son and although we never see him we hear him, repeatedly interrupting mummy's efforts to blag £25,000 at an interest rate slightly above the inflation rate of post-war Germany.
"Mum, where's my scooter?" he bellows off-set. Instead of saying "Shut your fucking trap you ignorant little shit, I'm on the bloody phone", she dutifully replies "Try the garage!"
Seconds later the little bastard is at it again. "Mum, I can't find my trainers!" What's going on in that bloody house? Is the little son of Satan blind, stupid or just fucking bone idle? Bearing in mind moron mummy has just told her husband to "shut it" after he dared to have a quiet word in her shell-like, does she say "Try fucking looking for them yourself. Oh, and by the way, I've no idea who your dad was", before adding a warning that he's about one step away from being found a place in a children's home? Like Hell she does! "Under the bed!" she shouts.
No sooner is she back on the blower than the little arsehole comes back with "My scooter's not in the garage!" That's where I would have really lost it. I would have politely told the loan arranger to hang on for a few minutes and then I would have gone upstairs to ram the demanding little turd's Adidas Pratpumps AND his wheelymax 210 up his arse.
Surprisingly, Geordie woman doesn't respond in anyway at all........until she hears the sound of her husband tripping over something metallic which evidently sends him crashing to the floor. Now this is in no way coloured by recent events in the Pither household but does she then say "Darling, are you all right?", let alone "Oh Jesus H fucking Christ, I'll have to go because I think my husband has just seriously injured himself"? Nope. She just chuckles "Josh, dad's found warr scooter!" Uncaring, thick bitch!
Picture Loans were packed off to Grantham some time ago now. Well, Josh, his trainers and his fucking scooter can follow them!

In Which Pither Goes To Casualty

I've got a new name for my greenhouse.
It used to be called, somewhat unimaginatively, "the greenhouse". It is now and shall henceforth, however, be known as "the fucking, bastard greenhouse".
I chose this new name at around 8.10 last night, shortly after I had watered my sole surviving marrow plant. Still carrying two watering cans, I turned to walk out, caught my toe on the bottom lip of the door frame and went crashing to the ground. I was unable to break my fall, my hands being full, and the slabbed patio did not provide a really comfortable landing.
I remember murmuring an expression of mild disappointment at my clumsiness and there was also, I recall, just the faintest exclamation of discomfort as pain shot through my body. "You ok, Reg?", shouted the next-door-but-one neighbour from his garden. At that point, my very-soon-to-be ex-wife came charging out to find that I had flattened the water butt and was lying on top of the watering cans, my head half an inch from the garage wall.
The pain, which centred on my left knee and shot right up my thigh, was intense but I was, of course, a brave little soldier and hardly made any fuss whatsoever, particularly when the diminutive Mrs P somehow managed to half carry my 16-stone frame up to bed and then administer emergency first aid in the form of a bag of frozen peas applied to my knee.

I dosed up on pain killers and spent a night without sleep, hoping that everything would be all right, or at least not so bad, in the morning............but come dawn my knee had swollen up like a football, the pain was, if anything, worse and I could hardly limp, let alone walk.
So, this afternoon, Mrs P finished work early to come home and take me to casualty. The ordeal lasted four hours - shorter than I had expected - and torn ligaments were diagnosed, a break having been ruled out by an X-ray.
Mrs P left me at one point to rush home and tend to the menagerie and so after I had been strapped up and given a pair of crutches I went outside to await her return. Unfortunately, the pain of standing up began to get to me again and so I attempted to slide down a wall and seat myself on a small ledge at its foot - big mistake! I slipped off, bumped onto the ground and ended up on my ass by a rubbish bin.

I have to admit I was feeling pretty low at that point (literally!) but consoled myself with the thought that things couldn't get much worse. I should have known - never, ever, ever say that to yourself. That was when a drunken woman stumbled over to me, offered me a fag and a swig of her Special Brew (seriously) and promptly sat down beside me to share her challenging views on race, society and her "fookin' ex".
She eventually stood up and shuffled away when VSTB EW drew up to collect me.

So, I am now a uniped. I think my job is safe because I am wirelessly connected at Pither Towers and so can work from home over the next few days but I think my chances of fun or even a holiday - something I had been planning - are bleak at the moment.

Nothing for Grantham and, on that subject, VSTB EW will never get sent. She has been an utter brick today, running around after me and being very caring. In the absence of third parties, then, why are we getting divorced, some might ask? Answers on a postcard, please.

Dib, Dib, Dib.....Knob, Knob, Knob

"....Unt aftervards vee shall play at ze pinging-ponging unt zen shtick our vinky-wurts up each uzzers bottoms."


Wherever you look there is a sea of canvas. Camp fires are burning from Brixton to Baghdad, the khaki hordes are massing and, when dusk descends, that terrifying war cry fills the air................."ging, gang, gooly-gooly-gooly-gooly, watcha, ging, gang, goo....".


Yes, it's 100 years since no-one apparently batted an eyelid when closet homosexual Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell announced "I'm taking all these little boys away for the weekend and girls can't come".
Baden-Powell, the author of the marvellously twin-meaninged Scouting For Boys, first openly camped it up in 1907 on Brownsea Island, off Poole in Dorset, and the scouting movement was born. The centenary of that fateful event is being celebrated, not only in Britain but around the world, so much so that there has been an international run on bangers and beans, the sleeping bag industry is at breaking point and you can't find a ping-pong ball in the shops for love nor money.
Now this is where I have to highlight a slight split in the Pither camp. My brother is a scout leader and sees absolutely nothing wrong in a 53-year-old man donning shorts, playing games with a bunch of boys and then spending the night with them.

"So, tell me, how long have you been an ardent fascist?"................the scout leader asked her.

Me, I find it a tad unhealthy. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying our kid is a paedophile - he most definitely is not, and I'm sure there are two or three other blokes involved in scouting who aren't either, but.......well......just but......really.
Dodgy motives aside, you are still left questioning the mentality of men who like to spend their time away from work in the company of people whose only interests in life are masturbating and collecting football cards (Mrs Pither has just nudged me at this point and said "You're going to get in so much trouble!!")
I think my main problem with the scouts, apart from the fact that I have reached an age where the little bastards have started to help me across the road, is that they are a paramilitary organisation, what with the uniforms, the saluting, the ranks etc. Call me Mr Picky if you like but I think the militarisation of our young people is not an especially good thing. I know it was very popular in the late '30s but I don't see anyone running around celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Hitler Youth (except for Steve Cornell, a bloke I used to work with) - and there's a good reason for that.
You see, Baden-Powell had a couple of teensy issues when it came to being a role model for our children, namely he was a racist and a fascist who greatly admired Hitler and Mussolini. Would you buy a second-hand tent off a man like that?
It has often been argued, and I happen to agree, that all BP wanted to do with the scouts (when he wasn't buggering them rigid, that is) was to prepare the nation's youngest of young men for war. Having been a lifelong soldier he kinda liked war and thought it was character building. Me, I'm pretty much against it, what with all the genocide, blood and songs by the likes of Vera Lynn 'n' all.
You may not be surprised to learn that Pither was NOT a scout - or a cub or a badger or a Venezuelan tree vole or whatever they call members of the uber-youth wing. Learning to set fires and handle a knife were not high on my list of priorities when I was alive, although teenagers of today seem pretty keen on them, scouts or no scouts! I think I found it all a bit.......a bit........well, silly, really.
Now in my dotage I still can't see the scouts as harmless, although I have to admit to a great fondness for curvaceous, 40-something-year-old women bursting out of guides uniforms.

Now that DOES make me want to play tents!

Then again, that particular weakness of mine is in no way driven by a desire to see mid-life maidens learn all about field craft (well, not THAT kind of field craft).
No, to sum up, the scouts are a paramilitary organisation, dreamed up by a Nazi-loving racist and run by strange men short on long trousers and a proper social life. They've got to go.

The Sensational Blog-o-Matic!

Have you bought your JML Super Slicer yet? No? Well, you're a fool to yourself!
This whizzo product is currently being flogged on the telly and everytime it pops up I am tempted to buy, buy, buy because it puts me in mind of the seemingly always-sunny '70s, when life was good, Pither was alive, mortgaging was something you did in Monopoly and the only baggage girls of my acquaintance carried around with them was a satchel.
The Super Slicer is.......well.......just a thing for slicing other things. It's not exactly a teleportation machine, nor is it a cure for cancer. It is, in truth, a completely crappy piece of crud (bearing in mind that the knife was invented centuries ago) but it is advertised in such a way that you feel you must be an idiot for not having one in your home. Nostalgia rears its ugly head because in the days of my youth there was another company which was always plugging equally ridiculous products on our screens............K-Tel! Remember?

K-Tel was most famous for its compilation albums.




There were winners such as Soul Motion, Super Bad and Dynamite, all with "20 Original Hits by 20 Original Artists" (despite the fact that each track was edited down to around 2 minutes). Although I have to admit I've got a box of these somewhere up in the attic, I used to prefer the Super-Slicer-type wonder products K-Tel also tried to flog.
There was the legendary Fishin' Magician. Then there was the Buttonmatic, followed closely by the Brush-o-Matic. There was the Hair Magician and,
for the more discerning customer, the K-Tel Record Selector or the equally scientific Cassette Selector. The beauty of K-Tel was that almost all of its products had one fantastic property - they didn't fucking work!
Ah, those were the days. God's speed, JML! Good luck. Take on the mantle of K-Tel and fill the attics of generations yet to come with worthless, broken, plastic gadgets. You shall not go to Grantham.

Plastic Man

Mind The Reality Gap.

The Wardrobe is knackered again and so today I had to be Mr Suited Commuter and join the rest of the unwashed on the 7.35am to Euston - what a bloody nightmare!
The Virgin Pendolino (I think that's Italian for "urine-smelling skip filled with the detritus of humanity") actually pulled in on time but that was about as good as things got. The train, as I expected, appeared completely rammed but then I spied a seat occupied only by a briefcase. "'Scuse me. Is anyone sitting here?" I enquired. Quickly realising that this was a pointless question to ask a case, I redirected my enquiry to the snoozing, fat, beardy bloke accompanying the baggage whom I assumed was the pig ignorant owner. "Tsk, hurrumph, pah!" was the only response - from the bloke, you understand, not the briefcase. Fatshite begrudgingly shifted his briefcase down to between his legs, all the while looking at me as though I had just urinated in the urn containing his mother's ashes, and then suction-cupped his face back to the window, lolled his mouth wide open and resumed the warthog impersonation I had so obviously rudely interrupted.
It turned out that we had 18 buttocks between us and I was left perching precariously on the edge of the seat because I only had two of them. This ignorant, fat, twat then kept tossing (no!) and turning for about 15 minutes, all the while grumbling under his breath, until he at last spoke his only words of our encounter. "Oh God!" he barked as he barged past me and made off! We were midway between stations so he was not preparing to get off but I never saw him again. I think he must have thrown himself onto the rails somewhere short of Birmingham International.
Fatty's place was quickly taken by another rotund object, this one sporting a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. It promptly unfurled a voluminous copy of a newspaper - the Guardian, I think - and began reading some pretentious arts review bollocks. Pither, meanwhile, was skimming through Viz and laughing out loud. This drew sneering, sideways glances from Guardian Man until he too made a sharp exit after spying me reading an agony aunt's column for nuns which offered a number to call for advice on vaginal dryness.
As I neared my destination I decided to vacate my seat and let the disabled, pregnant, pensioner, Downes Syndrome woman, who until then had been standing in the aisle, sit down (joke!) and I made my way to the carriage doors.
It appeared that, a mere minute earlier, a gangrenous, BO-riddled rat with a serious bowel complaint had exploded in the nearby toilet and so I spent the last few minutes of the journey exchanging accusatory glances with the similarly suited and booted business types around me who were also waiting to disembark.
On a more serious note, I took a taxi to my office from the station at which I alighted and so the trip from home to work and back, without my car, took three hours and cost a total of £40. If I had taken public transport all the way (which would have involved taking two buses instead of the taxi from the station where I got off) the round trip would have taken four hours 20 minutes and cost a total of £18.40......and the Government wants those of us outside London to reduce our carbon footprint, use public transport and keep our jobs. How, I ask?

Cider With Bullshit

There's been an interesting development in the puss-filled, poisonous, cankerous cesspit which is the world of advertising (God, I love it!)
Do you remember the days when us shareholders in UK Ltd were all allowed to eat Marathon bars and Opal Fruits while the girlies whacked Oil of Ulay on their mushes? Then, following a take-over by Europe Plc, we were forced, instead, to snack on Snickers and Starbursts and Oil of Olay became the weapon of choice for the females.
We were told that it was to bring us into line with the continent. I seem to remember reading somewhere that Hitler tried to bring us into line with the rest of Europe a while back but it was frowned upon then. How tastes change!
Anyway, now we're all unified, homogenised and brandised (sorry, got carried away there), trust the bloody Irish to go and throw a spanner in the works! Cast your minds back again. Do you remember when, not so long ago, our pubs and TV screens were filled with fashion victim wankers glugging "Magners on ice" at about £4-a-throw? The commercials told us that it had to be drunk with ice and so the brain dead did as they were told and queued up to obey the orders. It was the "in" thing, apparently, and you simply didn't exist, daarling, unless you ordered iced cider.
Well, now the Magners frenzy has died down, the ad men are hard at it again, this time plugging Bulmers cider. There are more commercials featuring trendy types, this time drinking cider which we are being led to believe actually migrates to frozen climes, much like salmon.
No doubt Bulmers will become the new "in" thing. "Oh no, baby, Magners is like so yesterday. It's Bulmer's today. You ask anyone, well, anyone who is anyone." The slight problem is that BULMERS IS MAGNERS, and vice versa!! In Ireland it's called Bulmer's, over here it's called Magners - yet they are being advertised as separate drinks.
Instead of unifying brands, they have now started dividing them up again. I suppose there's nothing wrong in that, so long as they make it clear it's exactly the same gut-churning, teeth-rotting muck......but they don't.
I suppose I am a bit prejudiced (there's a turn up for the books!) My memories of cider are not pleasant. It was, like many of my generation, my first illicit tipple and it does not conjur up for me images of glaciers and migrating salmon so much as visions of bike sheds and vomit. I now hate the bloody stuff.
Anyway, I'm sorry, but Bulmers being Magners and Magners being Bulmers has to go, along with the conmen who are trying to cash in on the different names.

A Load Of Cobras

Wow! I never knew that!
I learnt today that the Government's top secret, emergency response task force, codenamed "Cobra", takes its name from where it meets......Cabinet Office Briefing Room A.
That's a bit of a disappointment, really. I thought the name Cobra had been deliberately chosen to reflect the sleek, deadliness of its members who were all, I assumed, mysterious and determined operatives, each known only by a letter of the alphabet, who wore white dinner jackets and bow ties and were able to strike anywhere, silently and with lethal precision.
My disappointment was compounded when I also learnt that Cobra met last night and was chaired by........................Hilary Benn!! Not only is he no James Bond, his name is not one to strike fear into the hearts of our enemies. He sounds more like an extra from Balamory!
The element of happenstance behind the naming of Cobra made Pither wonder how credible and dashing this elite force would sound if it met somewhere else.

Would it carry the same gravitas if it met in the "Cabinet Office Briefing, Liaison and Emergency Reaction Suite"?

Would the choice of "The War And Terrorism Suite" send out the wrong signal?

How about the "Strategic Planning Emergency Wing".........................................................................................................or the "General Operations and
National Action Departmental Snug"?
It would be even worse if we didn't have people obsessed with acronyms in Whitehall. I mean, how inspiring would it be to learn that the floods which have hit the nation had prompted a meeting of the "Gordon's Back Bedroom" group, the "Gents' Lavvies" council or the "Meeting-Room-C-But-Brenda-From-The-Cabinet-Keep-Fit-Class-Needs-It-In-The-Afternoons" task force?


Just a thought. Sorry I mentioned it.

And It's Fuck Off From Me...........

I'd like to wish a cheery "fuck off!!" to three groups of people this morning.
Firstly, it's "fuck off!!" to our private train operators. The rail network is gridlocked, an on-time train is harder to find than a photo of the Queen flicking the Vs and we pay to sit but have to stand in Black Hole of Calcutta carriages.
Help is at hand, however, and £28 krillion or something is about to be invested in the system to ease the situation. A new station is to be built which will take the strain off the bursting-at-the-seams London Bridge station in the capital by taking on up to 10,000 commuters in the rush-hour. New Street station in Birmingham is to undergo a major revamp in an effort to actually allow trains to run through it and expansions are planned at other bottle-necks around the country.
Guess who's paying for the bulk of this? Yup, that's right, it's us, Johnny Taxpayer. "But I thought the railways were privatised?" I hear you ask. "Not completely," I reply. You see, the bits which make money have, indeed, been hived off to the corporate greed merchants but the messy side of things, the side which needs money throwing at it left, right and centre for no return, is the responsibility of us taxpayers. It's a belter! It's called The Third Way, that brave new world which ushered in "public-private sector partnerships" whereby both sides put in money but only one gets any return. In effect, "the public" pays out to help "the private" make money. Thatcher (who fucking else!) gave Blair the idea with one of her first sell-offs of our family silver - the GPO. Half of the outfit made obscene amounts of money - Telecom - and the other half made equally obscene losses - the Post Office. So, what to do? Why, you flog off the profit making bit to your business chums and you leave the poor fuckers who put you in power to pay, pay, pay for the loss-maker, with no prospect of a return (like a Virgin round-trip ticket!).
Back to the railways, what do you think has been the train operators' response to this crisis? To hide their heads in shame? To offer to walk naked through every city, town and village in the country so that residents can whip them and throw rotten fruit? No, not quite. What they've done is to hike up prices by six per cent since last year and they have warned that they're going to rack them up again soon. Thanks guys. You can pay £200 to get from Manchester to Edinburgh already and you think that we still aren't paying enough for a totally unreliable, overcrowded service which takes more than four times as long and costs four times as much as it does to fly?

Another hearty "fuck off!! today goes to my old pals, the health Nazis. They've already got us smokers standing out in the pouring rain on a night out, they've made everyone terrified of eating a host of things in case they turn them into Cyril Smith or give them cancer but at the same time they've got us eating so much fucking fruit that no-one in Great Britain has been able to have a shit for the last two years! Well, now they've set their sights on one of the most evil, disruptive and dangerous sections of our society - pensioners! Crumblies are boozing too much, they say, and it's got to stop. Bugger off, will you! Just leave them alone. They've worked all their lives - that's real work, not sitting on their fat, purulent, spotty behinds telling everyone else how to live their lives - and they can do what the fuck they like now, within reason. Bring on the pissed up pensioners, I say.

My final "fuck off!!" goes to contract cleaners in hospitals. The potentially lethal MRSA bug is rampant across the country, so much so that if you're run over by a bus you have a better chance of recovering if you stay exactly where you are for three months - i.e. lying, blood-spattered and with broken limbs, in the middle of the B339 - than if you go to hospital. But wait, what's this? Infection rates have been cut dramatically in Wales. I wonder how that has happened? Well, the only major difference between the NHS in Wales and the service in England and Scotland is that our Celtic cousins have scrapped the use of private cleaning companies and brought the cleaners back "in-house". Could there be a link, do you think?
Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to Grantham they go - all of them!
P.S......and the police and judicial system can fuck off as well!! (BGT told me to say that, but I do happen to agree).

Non-Existent Uses For Extraordinary Talents

"And that's it, is it Trevor?"


I know I am becoming obsessed by THAT book (see previous posts) but it came to mind again tonight.
God can be an arse sometimes so please spare a thought for American, George Widener. George featured in a fantastic TV programme this evening about savants. He is a savant - more specifically, he is "a prodigious savant".
He is in love with numbers - he calls them his friends and says they follow him about everywhere - and, despite being autistic, he has mental powers of calculation which truly defy belief.
George, who is also an exceptional artist with a draftsman's eye for detail and recollection, would be classed as a genius, alongside the likes of Chopin and Leonardo, were it not for his disability which makes tasks which are simple to the rest of us, like shaving, an impossibility.
Now George's spectacular talent may be unique but he is not alone when it comes to people having extraordinary and seemingly inexplicable abilities - savants, in other words. The programme highlighted a guy who can play back a complex piece of music on the piano, however long and intricate the piece may be, having heard it just once. Another chap could read and memorise 500 pages of text in an hour and he had committed to memory thousands of books and millions of pages.
The only comedic moment in this otherwise fascinating programme was the story of Tom, a Scouser, who became a prolific and talented painter in mid-life immediately after suffering a brain hemorrhage, despite never having painted before or been trained. The hemorrhage happened when he was sitting on the bog, a friend knocked on his front door and so he tried to curtail his toilet time by straining harder than he otherwise would have done!!!
Anyway, back to George. What exactly was his extraordinary skill? Well, if you give him a date, any date, he can tell you what day of the week it will be/was. I frequently don't know what day it is today and so to hear someone throw "February 18, 2037" at George and then hear him, without a pause, say "a Wednesday" was quite shocking. "October 9, 1826?" "a Monday!"
Fucking Hell! That is scary. I spent a brief moment wondering how George was able to do this but, while the documentary makers went on to spend the rest of the programme trying to answer that question, it then occurred to me...................what fucking use is it? I mean, pianoman could at least make a living as a concert pianist. Bookworm boy's memory skills have a thousand different applications. But George.......?
Ok, it would break the ice at parties and come in handy when people in the office were trying to book their holidays but apart from that? Poor bastard.
It's a bit like those stupid fucking entries in the Guinness Book Of World Records. Fair enough, the tallest person, the longest jump, the highest mountain and the fastest object probably all warrant a mention. The quickest someone has hopped from Land's End to John O'Groats or the longest anyone has balanced on their left ear do not.
As I said, spare a thought for George but I'm afraid useless talents have got to go to Grantham....................tonight (it's a Monday).
P.S. For those who are interested, the documentary makers suggested that a savant makes use of the right side of the brain (often as a result of injury) which deals with detail and lower thought processes while the rest of us are stuck with predominantly using the left side which deals with analysis and logic........unless of course they are a DJ, Big Brother house member or a reader of The Sun, in which case they have found a way of functioning without resort to the brain at all.

More Indigestion.

................How about?:

Reader's Indigestion Presents..........

Inspired by the marvellous Extraordinary Uses For Ordinary Things, I am in the process of compiling my own best-seller......Fitting Uses For Famous Faces.
All contributions are welcome but I think I've got this soon-to-be winner off to a satisfactory start:
























































While I carry on compiling this essential read, if anyone could give me some tips on how to get a life I would appreciate it.