A Small Matter of a Fight.

I hardly ever post three times in one day but this is far too precious to leave until another time. Besides, if I don't post it now I will forget about it.
I have chums who work in the theatre. Neither they, nor the theatre involved, can be named, for obvious reasons. However, they told me this afternoon of the antics at a recent after-show party which just have to be made known to the Pither public.
The cast of the annual panto decided to have a bit of a bash when one of their number celebrated a birthday. I can't say what the panto was, suffice to say that it involved one beautiful, black-haired woman and seven seriously-below-average-height men.


Anyway, everything was going swimmingly at the after-show birthday bash, apparently, until the drink started flowing a little too freely. Several revellers then took it upon themselves to start patting the below-average-height cast members on the top of the head as they danced, a la Benny Hill with his little, balding sidekick. Dropping to the knees and boogeying followed, again to the understandable annoyance of the vertically challenged thespians. Eventually it all became too much. The SEVEN vertically challenged guys started cutting up rough - as I would have done in their situation - and a virtual fight ensued. I would have given not only my right but also my left arm to have been there to snap a photo of the mini-mayhem.
My unnamed chum also told me that this was not the only Brian Ricks-style farce to accompany a staging of this production at the theatre. He told me that one year the cast included six "dwarfs" and one "midget" who made up the chums of the dark-haired beauty. There is a difference between "dwarfs" and "midgets" - dwarfs are congenitally small, midgets are just smaller than average. The result was that the "dwarfs" started picking on the slightly taller "midget" throughout rehearsals and the shows. I can only imagine what was said during the tirades. "Hey, Lofty, give us a song", "Oy, Longfellow, Hi Ho!!!" or "What's the weather like up there, odd-one?". It's too bizarre to even contemplate.
The upshot of all this? Well, I think oversensitive dwarfs have to go to Grantham.

He's 'Avin a Go at The Birds Now!

Bloody scrounging birds! No, this isn't another dig at women, it's the feathered variety which has got me shopping about for an air rifle this time.
I feed the birds in my garden. Ok, no big deal, loads of people do. Thing is, the feeder pictured was filled to the brim last night and by lunchtime today the greedy bastards had eaten most of it! There are about five other feeders in the back garden alone and all of them have been damn-near emptied in a matter of hours.
I know you are supposed to give the birds a helping hand during the lean winter months but this is taking the piss. It's fucking ridiculous. I am being taken for a mug. On top of that, I think I am contributing to an obesity crisis among the feathery fat-arses to rival the one us and the Americans are experiencing.
I'm spending a bleeding fortune on bird seed to keep these insatiable wankers happy and all the while the SS Pither Finances is going down with all fucking hands! Christ knows what I will have for dinner today, the labels have fallen off all the tins, and no gullible do-gooder is going to come round with some free, tasty tit-bits for ME.

Your bird seed or your life, short-arse!

I'm going to start keeping a closer eye on the garden. Either I've got flocks of dole-cheat-style sparrows, tits, finches and the like of almost Biblical proportions camped outside, just waiting to sponge off me, or one 9ft-tall, 28-stone plover or something is waddling in once a day for a Mr Creosote-style feeding-frenzy.
Now I know why Hitchcock made The Birds - he must have hated the buggers as well. Corpulent birds with over-active thyroids and appetites like Cyril Smith's - get 'em Granthamed!

Cave Canum - The Dingo of Doom.

"You looking at me, pal?"


Awww! How cute. Butter wouldn't melt, eh? Dont' you bloody believe it! Behold, I bring you THE Devil Dog - a licky Lucifer, the canine anti-Christ, a barking Beelzebub.
The photograph above is of one of my dogs, Caty. I actually Christened her Cato, after the martial arts-trained, sudden-attack sidekick of Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films. Like her big screen namesake, she quickly developed a habit of hiding and then leaping out and attacking you without warning. The name eventually morphed into Caty but all her old bad habits remain and she has nurtured a host of new ones besides.
Caty is a rescue dog. She was dropped off at Pither Towers two years ago by a taxi driver who knew I took in strays and other sad cases (see previous blogs on my relationships with women!). To be honest, I should have smelled a rat on that fateful day. I remember the driver seemed to be in a great hurry. He hastily got the dog out, told me she was six months old and "a kelpie", and, with that, got back into his car, there was a screech of tyres, a loud "vroom" and he was off!
Funny, I thought. I suspected, at the time, that the driver had a rush job on. Now I know why he was anxious to get away while I was still holding the proverbial baby. I thought kelpie was a type of seaweed and so looked the breed up on the internet. My source said a kelpie was an Australian cattle dog, bred specifically by farmers in the Outback to herd and generally help out. So far so good. Then came the bombshell. "The kelpie is a cross between a collie and.........a dingo," it said. A DINGO!!! A BLOODY DINGO!!!!! Oh my God! It was then that I began to realise I might have made a teeny mistakette in agreeing to take her on. The only other snippets of information I can recall from that initial research are that it said kelpies would "use their paws like hands", "herd other pets" and that they had "boundless energy".
Saying Caty is energetic is like saying Keith Moon on acid would not have made an ideal librarian! She has single-handedly trashed Pither Towers since her arrival. To date she has ripped out and chewed up THREE phones, eaten countless shoes, torn the wallpaper off the wall on the landing, noshed on a briefcase, initialled almost every door with a trail of scratch marks, chewed holes in the settee and left more maps of Ireland about the place than there are in the average Eireann Tourist Information shop. Things were bad enough when she was a pup but now she has joined "the terrible twos club" - of which I am sure parents of toddlers are well aware - she has to be at the peak of her destructive powers. Even when she takes a momentary break from her ADD antics to sit right in front of you and attempt to stare you out you can almost hear the mantra going through her mind - "bored, bored, bored, bored, bored!"
Caty's real triumph has been in the back garden. I am very proud of my garden - or rather I was - but this furry atomic bomb's on-going project is to turn it into something resembling The Somme battlefield. My soon-to-be ex-wife's theory is that Caty's obsession with digging is merely a sub-conscious determination to get back down to the land of her fathers. She also races around the lawn and flower beds in ever-decreasing circles, either chasing the other dogs or just her tail. She can stop on a sixpence and then accelerate up to maximum speed in the blinking of an eye which, in dry weather, produces pretty devastating results on the turf and beds. In the sodden winter months her racetrack ravings turn the place into a sea of mud.
I hit on the idea of buying some chickenwire and putting a corale around one particularly badly affected area with a view to keeping her out so that I could re-seed it. Given a break from the tornado toddler the grass would at least get a chance to take hold again, I thought. Did it keep her out? Did it bollocks! It, in fact, made the problem worse!

The Not-So-Ok Corale.

The first time I let her out to be confronted by the chickenwire she looked back briefly in gratitude and delight and proceeded to neatly showjump it about ten times. I could almost hear her: "Thanks dad, this is brill!" Caty sees the corale as an obstacle course and loves to leap over it and back, over and back, over and back, often from just a sitting-start. She also sees it as her den, because the other dogs cannot scale the wire, and so uses it to store all the things which are precious to her - bits of chewed up wood, an artistic collection of dog pooh, old shoes, flowerheads, my hosepipe, stones she has taken a fancy to, the odd tree branch, snail shells and bits of cardboard. That really improves the overall look of the place!
Who will rid me of this turbulent toddler? I have never given up on a rescue dog yet and I don't intend to start now but that won't help to patch up my tattered nerves. I shall have to satisfy myself with some schadenfreude instead. Henceforth, all OTHER dingos shall be sent to Grantham. I would like to think the townsfolk are suffering as much as I am.

Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice? - Yeah, And My Nephew Is A Mid-Range Simian!

Ignite match, apply to blue touchpaper and withdraw. This is going to put the proverbial feline among the flying rats but it has to be done. Right, here goes.
There is a group of people on this planet who, by all the rules of Pitherdom and this blog, deserve more than any other to be exiled to Grantham. They are one of God's many little jokes. Perhaps HIS finest. They can be more venemous than the average Gila Monster, they are as rational as an Arab at an anti-USA protest, as verbally restrained as Dr Ian Paisley on speed, as infuriating as finding that batteries are not included and as logical as the instructions for an Ikea thermo-nuclear particle accelerator. There is a teeny problemette, however. I, and indeed most men, couldn't do without these unfathomable lunatics and so I am in somewhat of a quandary.
Deep breath. Ok - the offending group is...................WOMEN (and people who generalise?). There, I've said it. I can already smell the waves of oestrogen and outrage building all around me, hear the high-pitched shrieks and sharpening of stilletoe heels and positively taste the poison and passion in the air. To put the record straight, I am NOT a mysogynst. It could be argued, however, that I am occasionally compelled to help them out when they're busy.
This rant, probably my longest to date, comes to you courtesy of a visit made by Pither this morning to Small Town. I had to stop en-route to get money from the cashpoint. Yes, you know what's coming. It has been detailed many times before, by many others. The woman ahead of me in the queue approached the machine and then spent half an hour firking about in her voluminous handbag for her cashcard (why do women have handbags larger than the average Royal Marine's kitbag?). She then produced a card, put it in the hole-in-the-wall, only to discover that Lloyds TSB does not accept Sainsbury's reward cards. Another half-hour firk and in went another card - oops! Wrong way round. Out and then in again. Now the hardest bit of all - the on-screen instructions. Back into that fucking bag again, this time for her sodding glasses. She then peered closely at the screen and appeared to find "key in PIN, followed by 'enter', then service required and then amount" about as taxing as calculating pye to 3,456 figures. When she had finally worked it out and got her money - while all us men in the queue behind her were busy shaving - she spent another half an hour putting the notes in the correct little pockets in her purse. Phew! Thank Fuck! She's finished, we thought. Oh dear me no. She next wanted to check her balance on that and about four other accounts and so the whole episode was repeated and repeated. Us XY chromosome-types by now realised it would have been quicker to have gone away, manufactured sawn-off shotguns out of old baked bean cans and masks from discarded cottonwool buds and then returned and held up the fucking bank! It would probably have been just as quick for us to have dreamed up some winning idea, built up a worldwide business empire worth billions and then bought the bank!
On to the petrol station to top up the car (before it got dark!) and, horror of horrors, a woman pulled in to the two-pump place just ahead of me. She, of course, pulled up at the first pump, I couldn't pass her to get to the unused second pump, and so I had to wait for her to finish. I, of course, had to reverse almost immediately because she did so, having pulled up too far away from the pump for the hose to reach her tank. Back up to the pump again. More peering at the instructions. "Oh Christ! Kill me now! Take me, I am ready for you!" Petrol in, a similar handbag fiasco in the station shop as was witnessed outside the bank and then she went back out to the car where she spent a further half an hour applying another coat of make-up to her crazy-paved face using the rear-view mirror. Time for my third shave of the day.
I finally got into town to find it was very busy but the crowds would have been negotiable had it not been for the fact that most of the women there were apparently staging a fucking rolling roadblock protest with pushchairs, prams and shopping trollies. "Excuse me please, thank you, oops, sorry love, thank you, ooh, can I just get by, thanks, 'scuse me, etc." Those few women unarmed with wheeled weapons seemed to have rather too many genes from sloths and crabs in their chromosomal makeup for comfort. They walked - no, that is an exaggeration. They dithered along and as you adjusted your pace coming up behind them and attempted to go round they completely unexpectedly veered off momentarily to the side to block you. All this without them knowing that you were there. It was just pure instinct in action. You dodged round the other way and they veered off again in the opposite direction, again for no apparent reason other than to ruin your already pathetic life.
When I eventually got to the ONE FUCKING SHOP I wanted to visit, battered, bruised and with blood pressure at a level which could pump the average central heating system, what was left of my heart sank even further. It was packed with hordes of XX chromosome-types. The gentler sex? Don't you bloody believe it! And the Lord said: "And lo, wherever goods shall be offered up for sale, so, there to, shall my daughters gather in legion. They shall protrude elbows like Satan's knives and garner the strength of many oxen, together with the spacial awareness of a blind man on casters. Yey, and this shall be unto the 4 millionth generation." There were endless handbag fumblings a la the bank, only this time each sale was protracted by a seemingly endless fucking vacuous conversation along the lines of what the weather was like or what colour nail varnish the woman standing next to George Clooney was wearing in the latest edition of Hello magazine. AAaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!
By this time, encounters on the drive home with the mobile psychopaths which are women at the wheel of cars were unable to hurt me too much as I had suffered so deeply already - you know, the "indicating left and turning right" ploy, the "attempting to pull out into traffic while looking in the opposite direction to that in which the cars are coming" habit and the "vacantly admiring the pretty colour changes on the traffic lights but refusing to act on them" game.
A very wise man once told me that women are best summed up by the "two ties for Christmas" scenario. You know, she buys you two ties for Christmas, you run upstairs and put one on to please her and when you come back down she says: "What's the matter with the other one?"
I prefer to think that there are many days when women are much like Tasmania - there are one or two nice places down there but on the whole you don't want to go.
To Grantham or not? The problem is, it's those "one or two nice places" and the occasional lapses into sanity, optimism, sensitivity, softness, and general loveliness which keep you coming back for more. No, they shall not go - the whole gender will, however, be henceforth on double secret probation.
PS. If anyone knows why my marriage has crashed and I am now officially "separated" would they please write to me at the address on this blog?
PPS. In case you were wondering, Thatcher is not, in fact, a woman - she is a Krinod from the Planet Thwarg and so is excluded from my leniency.

Pither, the Press and the Granthamgate Horror.

Pither exposed. Ok, it's a fair cop.


Oh lordy! That's torn it! I have been found out. It seemed funny at the time but I have downgraded to Chuckle Factor Five and now think my gonads could be heading for the mincer.
The folk of Grantham are onto me. I wonder how many of them have a sense of humour? I think I will shortly be finding out.
There is a delicious irony in the way I was exposed - it was by Her Majesty's Press. Yes, Pither, 21 years before the mast of daily newspaper journalism, hunted down like a dawg and put to the sword by fellow hacks. Is the blog just a bit of fun or "an insult to Grantham and its people", bellowed the Grantham Journal?
Well, the e-mails are starting to come thick and fast now but, guess what? It turns out that there are some jolly good eggs and socially sound coves in Grantham (thanks Pinky, you were the first). No, this isn't a pathetic, grovelling attempt to apply a placating Pither plaster to the gaping, weeping sore which is this blog. It is the truth.
This leaves me with a dilemma. Is it morally sound and totally equitable to unleash the contents of my own Pandora's Box on ALL of the townsfolk? It is, after all, basically the bricks and mortar of Grantham at which my bile is aimed, the concept, the image in the ether, not the inhabitants themselves - well, not all of them. I am tempted to think that the Baroness Bitch Troll From Hell, the Grantham-born Thatch Creature, was not fair to us during her reign of terror and that when we dared to complain her attitude was somewhat "On yer bike and tough titty fishface". I shall, however, rise above that.
I propose, therefore, an amnesty for all the Thatcherphobic residents of that Lincolnshire town. They shall be spared the Wrath of Pither. They shall, instead, be coralled in a happy suburb - Grantham Even Newer Town - where you can still buy sherbert fountains, where a call centre is a public telephone kiosk, where Big Brother is only a character in a book by Orwell and where people in hospital are "patients" and not "customers". Home-loving hedgehogs shall be theirs, along with funny people and a civic ban on musicals.
Hurrah! Viva Grantham Even Newer Town! Pestilence, plague and the pith of Pither to all Thatcherphiles in Grantham. Do your worst, bring it on. I'm still standing.

It's Quiz Of the Week Time Again.

Q. WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KELVIN MCKENZIE AND A BUCKET OF SHIT?






A. THE BUCKET!

Next week, multiple choice.

1. Is former Labour Education Secretary Ruth Kelly a sell-out, hypocritical, amoral turncoat who should have her bits glued up and then be forced to drink loads of water for sending her spawn to private school?..........Yes or Yes.







2. Should Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer be taken out and strung up by his soft and tender wobbly bits for continually using the imagined word "Iraqise" and thereby having botty sex with the English language?..................Yes or Yes.






Yes, I have just watched Question Time!

Love in a Tropical Climate.

Crisis! Wet crisis! A crustacian crisis, that's wet!
I suppose it was always on the cards. It's just that, somehow, you never think it will happen to you. Well, it happened to me today and I have only just finished putting matters right. Let me explain.
I have a pet lobster. Well, technically he's a crayfish (same thing), an Australian blue crayfish to be precise. He's called Reg - Reg Cray-fish, get it? When I decided to name him after one of the infamous London gangland killers The Krays my soon-to-be ex-wife imposed one condition after asking the following, superb question: "Which of the Krays was the violent one?" I tried to explain that was a little like trying to name the naughtiest of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse but we agreed that Ron was probably the most socially-challenged, having been declared criminally insane and ending his days in Broadmooor. "Well, I don't want him named after the violent one then," she concluded. So, Reg it was. After all, all Reggie Kray did was stab Jack "The Hat" McVitie to death through the eye.
Anyway, Reg the crayfish, like his eponymous dad, is a strange lad with some strange habits. About two months ago he fell in love - with the thermometer in his tank! (that's Reg the crayfish, not me.) It is a chunky, two-inch-diameter digital device (the thermometer, not the tank.....hang on, I'm getting confused now) and is normally stuck on the side of the tank, high up, by a rubber sucker. One day Reg scaled the tank, took it off and spent the rest of his time wandering round with it on display, proudly clutched ahead of him in his pincers. This bizarre behaviour continued and it became a focus of amusement at Pither Towers. Indeed, friends would often call round just to see Reg and his beloved promenading.
About a month ago, Reg's feelings took the inevitable step forward and he began a more physical relationship with his temperature-sensitive other-half by dragging the thermometer at nights into the cave where he sleeps. The pair would emerge the following morning, only to vanish again at nights to no doubt consumate their love (in whatever ways it is possible for a crayfish to screw a thermometer!)
I was happy for him. He was settled. He had found love and he was enjoying the delights of sex.
This week, however, a problem arose. I went to feed Reg this afternoon but he was nowhere to be seen. Then it occurred to me that I had not seen him yesterday, nor on Tuesday. In fact, I couldn't recall when I had see him last. I began a panicked search of the tank and eventually discovered where he was and what had happened. Reginald, bless him, had dragged the thermometer into his cave as per usual but had got it firmly wedged inside there, wedged so tight in fact that he couldn't get out!
I had to resort to some percussive maitainance and smash the cave open to get him and his lover out. A new cave has now been bought for the lad but I'm afraid I've had to curtail his nocturnal habits for a while. He will get his love back soon, but I am going to keep a closer eye on them from now on.
Randy lobsters can join the queue at the gates of Grantham, I think.