"D" is for Dog, Domesticity, Dumping - and Dunce.

Heavy is the head that wears the canine crown. Well, someone had to pay.
I returned from a job yesterday to find yet another steaming pile of doo-doos in the house, this time in the hall. It wasn't me - a simple case of non-presence. It wasn't my soon-to-be ex-spouse either - same defence. A quick glance round my four dogs after they had greeted me and I was met, from each in turn, by the canine equivalent of looking away and whistling.
I now have a set routine for dealing with this increasing problem. Henry, the leader of the pack, is shown the error of someone's ways by five minutes in the Naughty Corner. Once his sin-binning is over and my back is turned I leave him to "sort things out" with the others - he is quite good at kicking ass when it is needed.
Quite how this has any bearing on Grantham I'm not sure. I was bored. I panicked. Sue me.

A Pearl in the Ocean of Piss-Poor Pubs.

What a Relief for Drinkers AND Dogs - a Lava-tree.

My pub - for even if I don't actually own it I have spent enough in there to buy the place five times over - is a brilliant pub! It is what a pub should be.
The secret of its brilliance lies just as much in what it doesn't have as in what it does. For instance, when you walk through the front door, no-one looking like an extra from Rainbow accosts you, grinning inanely, and asks "Have you been to a Harvester before?" There are no plastic plants, no pseudo-trendy, shite prints on the walls, no collections of jumble sale books no-one would ever want to read on the shelves and no rows of hideous ornaments or brass bedpans. No-one behind the bar wears a uniform, is unable to pull a pint properly or insists on asking at the end "Is there anything else I can get for you?" (Yeah, out of my face!)
My pub serves food but there are no 3ft-high boards plastered around the place telling you how to order and then listing exactly what will happen after you have done so - the customers have clambered sufficiently high enough up the evolutionary ladder to understand the complexities of "Can I have some food?", "Yeah, we'll bring it to you." Once you've ordered, you don't have to put a little, numbered model of Lord Mountbatten or the battle of Kursk on your table so the staff will remember what you are waiting for. No-one says "enjoy" or "have a nice day" once the comestibles have been dished out.
There is no 287-yard-long bar staffed by the other kind of barman prevalent in today's suppers - a lone, adenoidal youth who refuses to serve and who spends all his time trying to chat up some hideous, bloated, young, acne-riddled tart squeezed into an outfit too tight for Barbie.
There is also a complete absence of a "ballpool" full of screaming kids, all throwing up over each other and running around with rubber tomohawks.
Finally, it is not called "O'Flaherty's", "The Didgerydoo", "Pseudo Sam's Saloon" or any other such purile fucking name with the brainless theme carried on inside in an effort to make it stand out - from the 23.5 million other brainless "themed" pubs around the country.
What "my" pub does have, however, is great, fucking beer! Guest ales which are changed regularly, a gaffer (No Surrender Gav) who knows how to let the beer settle before serving it up, who knows how to clean the pipes out and then flush them through afterwards and who, together with his lovely missus, Jaki, cooks lovely grub on the premises, spurning the mass-produced, microwaveable, portion-controlled muck available everywhere else and given ridiculous menu write-ups involving words like "lovingly", "piquancy" and "hint".
There are lots of little rooms and snaking passages between them, there is live music at least once a week, a beer garden, a covered, benched area outside for us smokers when the ban comes in and one of the finest jukeboxes in the Western world - the music is piped into just two rooms so that if you are not in the mood you can enjoy a chat or some peace and quiet everywhere else.
You can take your dogs into the covered, smokers' den. Hell, there is even a tree growing out of the middle of the gents' to cater for them! There is certainly no notice on the bog wall proclaiming that "these facilities were last inspected at 12.08pm by Darren" (who did indeed look at them - but couldn't be arsed to clean up the sick, mop up that sea of urine or collect the used johnnies floating in it!)
What is the end result of all this? Loads of people use the pub, people of all ages. There are no scraps, no exhibitions of vomiting - just a great atmosphere provided by great people.
When the four-minute warning sounds you'll find me in there. Grantham can have all the chain boozers. If you find yourself in one of them on that final day though, be warned. It'll take more than three and a half minutes to get past either the "Have you been to a Harvester before?" bollocks or the "Fuck off, I'm talking to my bitch" routine. Not much time for a sup to bid farewell to Thatcher's Britain.

Potty Training - The Awful "Truth".

I have long been an opponent of not only the teachings of Sigmund Freud but also of the whole bollocks which is psychoanalysis. My views were strengthened last night by a documentary entitled "Inside the Mind of Hitler", or something of that ilk.
The core of the piece was that the CIA, in 1943, asked a group of leading Yank pyschologists to draw up a psychological profile of Hitler with a view to predicting what he might do in the years which followed.
The boffins (don't you just love that word) concluded that Herr Hitler's challenging views on the world and what he should do with it had been formed by two major events in his childhood, a la Freudian theory. Firstly, he and his siblings had been beaten black and blue by his alcoholic and sexually abusive father and so he had developed an Oedipus Complex with an unnatural fondness for his mother. All right, I can run with that one. Feelings of being emasculated leading him to, shall we say, over-compensate in the testosterone department. The second major early trauma, according to these "experts", was a failing in one of the five key developmental stages in childhood allegedly identified by Freud. Where did it go wrong? Yes, you've guessed it, potty training!
It's so easy once it's explained to you. Why did a fuckwit, nonentity corporal with northern Europe's silliest moustache develop into a monster who would annihilate 6 million Jews, gipsies, mentally and physically disadvantaged people and non-Aryans and attempt to conquer the world, spreading as he did a completely fucked up view of Darwinism? Of course, because he hadn't been potty trained!!!!!
Psychologists? Yeah, astrologists have more street cred - and they're all wankers, we can all see that.I'm Afreud you can all go to Grantham.

Don't Worry, Be Happy........and Join Exit.

I have been blue (emotionally, not colour-wise, although that can't be far off) over the last few days for one reason or another, but quite what I've got to be down about beats me. I'm approaching 40 from the wrong side, going bald, I'm overweight, smoking myself to death, drinking too much, heading for a divorce and I have an overdraft only £2.47p short of Bolivia's. On the plus side, however, I ..................
Anyway, I decided to take a trip into the village to take a look at all the Christmas decorations to lift my spirits. I'm a big fan of Christmas (not the religion bit, just the mindless commercialism and re-runs of The Great Escape) and so the twinkly wonderland did the trick and I soon started to push thoughts of my meaningless existence to the back of what is left of my mind. So cheered was I by the festive atmosphere that I decided to treat myself to a dinner out so I went for cash to the building society, the one financial institution which doesn't have a large poster of me on the wall.
I walked in, straight up to the counter, and the young lass at the till took one look at me and said: "Do you have life assurance or a pension?" Thanks. Thanks a fucking bunch! I expected her to follow that up with "I don't know why you bother getting up in the mornings?" or "Don't go out and buy any LPs, will you?". Jesus, it's now got to the stage where I not only scare myself, I scare other people!
Confused and aged as I am, I suddenly forgot what I had gone in for, turned dejectedly on my heel and headed out, back towards the personal grief-hole which is Pither Towers.
My mind being fuelled by sarcasm as it is, a tune entered my head as I trudged home and I couldn't stop humming it. It was that classic ode to people who haven't got a fucking clue about what's going on around them - "Don't Worry, Be Happy" by Bobby McFerrin.
Don't worry! Be happy!! Are you fucking real? The only way to achieve that is to have a full-frontal lobotomy and walk around doped off your tits, and I can't afford either. Mind you, a few people I have worked for seem to manage it.
No, Bobby, sorry mateypops, it's Grantham for you. Just walk around singing your little ditty and see how long it is before the townsfolk do a Mussolini on you.

The Hell He Is! (Staying Out of Grantham).

Just watched the Green Berets on earth telly and been reminded of one of the finest comedy performances ever by, its alleged star, "Big John" Wayne. What a twat!
I never knew "The Good Ol' U S of A" had actually fucked off the North Vietnamese and won the "Vietnam War", let alone done it entirely thanks to the efforts of Big John, alias The Duke. This 6ft+ lump of glycogen had apparently been deemed the man for the job, despite having been rejected as unfit for military service in the US Army - Jesus, that is one Hell of an achievement - and who was later branded a draft-dodger by some of his countrymen.
Wayne was a neo-Nazi arsehole - Discuss? Right, discussion over - with the acting ability of a lump of red, white and blue clay. In his later years he attempted, through the medium of film, to put right so much that his beloved, awful homeland had fucked up but his efforts were thwarted because, sadly for him, people with brains were left in those countries his colleagues tried to a infiltrate, overtake, destroy or brainwash. He was what people in the hushed circles of film criticism would refer to as "a complete and utter wanker".
I could write more but he's just not worth it. Get off your horse - and walk with it into Grantham, you git! P.S. You lost that one Duke, get over it.

The Road to Grantham Piers! (I'll Even Drive You There).

"Piers Morgan - Why?" That should be an A-Level question for the country's millions of soon-to-be A*-graded sixth-formers, along with those other toughies they have to face such as "spell your name in block capitals".
I have just read a feature written by the former Mirror editor. Ok, I'll get my confession out of the way first. The article was in the Daily Mail. I know, I know, but it was the only thing to read in the greasy spoon where I was wolfing down a cholesterol special. I satisfied my conscience by knowing I had not paid for the Nazi rag and that I shall, at a later date, scrub my eyeballs and cut off my hands to remove all trace of it. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, Piers Morgan's stunning article. It was all about his in-depth knowledge of youthful, popular music combo Take That and its rise, fall and rise again (it is apparently topping the gramophone charts, minus original member Robert Williams).
The banner headline was words to the effect of "Why Robbie Hates Me (and Why the Feeling's Mutual)" - despite saying specifically in the piece that he did NOT hate "Robbie". Morgan claimed to have made Take That famous by plugging the band in his then showbusiness column in The Sun. He then droned on and on about how Robbie Williams is basically a shit and the other members are angels. Now, don't get me wrong, I know little or nothing about Mr Williams and the other coves. They matter to me about as much as a badger's fart in the woods. I'm sure they're good to their mothers (by not going home), wash behind their ears and just want world peace. It's Morgan who makes me want to upchuck in my shorts!
This tit is former editor of the supposedly pro-Labour Mirror and he writes for an ultra-right-wing toilet tabloid. Under his editorship, the Mirror constantly sniped at and looked down its nose at The Sun (pots and kettles?) and yet that was where he used to work and where he got his name known. He was sacked from the Mirror for abject fuckwittedness and yet still has the nerve to tout himself around like a media whore.
He describes a Robbie Williams autobiography in the article as "unrelenting narcissism" - that's kinda what autobiographies are, isn't it? Besides, for Morgan to accuse anyone of narcissism is a bit rich. This git is totally obsessed with himself and insists that we all have to hear his views on anything and everything. How many times does he appear on telly spouting off about one thing or another? Who cares what he fucking thinks, if he even does?
Oh, the point of his bloody feature? Yes, the books he wrote about Take That in the early days are being reissued so he wants to plug them. Is there anything this bloke won't do? In short, no! I talk as one who knows - I bought his granny.
His morals are, to say the least, somewhat questionable, his ego is sickeningly gigantic, he has no grasp of irony and he has a poncey name. Urgh!
It's time for The End of The Piers Show, I think. The sooner he heads off, the better.

Home Loving Dogs.

Yes, You Know Who You Are!

I took my dogs for their customary walk today. There are four of them. It is a bit of a struggle doing this alone - like being in charge of a dog sledge only without the opportunity to hop on the back of the sledge when the pulling outpaces the man supposedly at the reins.
We walked from my house to the village green and spent an hour running madly (well, they did) off the lead, 75 per cent of them defacating at every available opportunity and then looking back in wry amusement as dad had to scoop up the evacuations in bags. We then trekked back to Pither Towers and crowded into the kitchen for the usual post-walkies de-brief, dog treats and gallons of water.
Tilly, the smallest and most obstinate of the crew, disappeared during the big handout. It was unlike her to spurn some meaty chewchunks so I went looking for her. Phew! Found her! In my bedroom - where she had emptied the contents of her bowels on the carpet!! Not such much as a fart while walking on the Green. The little mare had been saving it up until she got back. "Thank God for that", she must have been thinking, "I thought we'd never get home. I was dying for a crap."
I hereby order that all of Grantham's dogs shall never again foul in the great outdoors but shall, instead, show their lavatorial love for their owners by dumping indoors.