The Gospel According To Pither

The Tree of Pither


Well, at last I know. The circle WILL be completed. I have amounted to nothing, of that I am sure. That I shall die a nothing seems inevitable. Now, thanks to my brother, I know that I came from nothing.....

"And the second son did sayeth unto his father: 'Yea, verily, you gaveth unto me ten talents and look, I have given you back ten talents.'"

I like that Biblical theme so I shall continue with it in an effort to explain. "And it came to pass that Pither's older sibling - he that standeth one full span and a small, tinned loaf, he that has lived more than two score and ten and whose hair hath been smiteth from his head - was much taken by the Devil's Lantern and parables of ancestry researched. Knowing, as he did, that the father who begat his father had been of much import in the place that is Mansfield, in the land called Notts, going by the title of "mayor" in that kingdom, Pither the elder did delve into his antecedents and toil into the midnight hour to reveal unto all the family tree.
"Now there lay great cunning and deviousness behind older Pither's trials for, verily, no shiteth could he in truth have given to learn the names of those unto the tenth generation of his tribe. No, being an avaricious man, the elder had reasoned that if one of his number had risen to become leader of the Mansfield temple then, forsooth, a pot of gold must surely somewhere lay buried.
"And so The Elder did delve, and he did labour and he did visit those places where many books are held until, after much digging, he did bring forth unto the tribe of Pither the fruits of his toil. Now The Elder was much troubled by that which was revealed unto him by his labours but Pither, being as alike The Elder as a pomegranate is to Caesar's arse, found much mirth in the results - in truth, the plums of his groin did falleth to the ground like the leaves of autumn, such was the laughter enjoyed.
"For it came to pass that the father who begat their father had indeed been much revered in that place which is Mansfield but he had risen by scurrilous means and had gone to sit with the Lord God Almighty without so much as a pot in which to piss.
"This revelation, like St Paul's encounter on the road to Damascus, had great impact on The Elder but the path ahead became even more strewn with stones as the roll of ancestors was unfurled. Verily, I say unto you that the lineage which spouted from the loins of he that was mayor ran thus:

Nobby Pither (Mayor of Mansfield)
..begat by Kevin (railway navvy)
..begat by Colin (railway navvy)
..begat by Dirk (railway navvy)
..begat by Lionel (interior designer)
..begat by Bert (railway navvy)
..begat by Peeper (felon)
..begat by Butch (navvy)
..begat by The Duchess of Bedford (female impersonator)
..begat by Charlie (navvy)
..begat by Puncher (navvy)
..begat by Rolf (painter)
..begat by Whoyoulookinat (navvy)
..begat by Ghengis (tourism rep)




Lionel, Butch and Ghengis Pither.

"And there were those who did mock Pither's telling of the tale and did accuse him of being full of the shit which doth fall from the bottom of the bull but Pither did counter this. He did hold up his hands unto The Lord and cry in his anguish "Ok, I made up bits of it but the stuff about all the fucking navvies is all true!".
"And so to all let this be known. The seed of Pither doth grow in infertile ground and as the plant doth currently wither and fade it shall return unto that barren place without anyone being any the fucking wiser!
"Pither doth, however, toil on in the safe and certain knowledge that all flesh is grass and his span on this earth shall soon pass. Until that day when all shall become as one, that place where there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth, that kingdom of Grantham, shall not have him.

"Here endeth the lesson."

It's All A Bit....Well.....Well.....A Bit.....I Mean....Wanky, Isn't it?

All this at the best pub in the world, as well! Is nothing sacred (pardon the oxymoron).
I do find it scary - just not quite in the way I'm supposed to.

The Lay-by and the Tramp

I am about to be forced from cover. I don't really see that I have much choice. I suppose I could stay schtum and thereby retain complete anonymity but my journalistic instincts, notably my love of a good story and the overpowering urge to share it, are too strong. I have to blab!
I have, like most Bloggers, always kept my exact location a secret to all but a few but a story has broken nationally to which I feel compelled to add my four penneth. This tale, unfortunately, is set in Pither's Small Town home, something which is about to become blindingly obvious to all but the most dimwitted, and so I shall be flushed out into the open - but hey, ho. Let's go.

The story concerns one Josef "Fred" Stawinoga. Have you read or heard about him? Well, for the uninitiated, Joe was a tramp who lived for 30 years in a tent on a grassy central reservation on the ring-road in Wolverhampton (ooh, what a give away!). He was such a unique character (Ed. Oi! You can't have degress of uniqueness!) that a few years ago some wag put him on facebook under the imaginatively entitled "We love you, Wolverhampton ring-road tramp" and he soon became an unwitting and extremely reluctant worldwide celebrity.
Joe became the subject of newspaper articles and television and radio features and then he hit the headlines again yesterday when, not content with having lived in a tent for a third of his life alongside one of the busiest and noisiest stretches of road in northern Europe, he went and did something REALLY silly - he died!
It is perhaps most remarkable that this Tolkienesque character, who had withstood downpours, gales and almost Arctic conditions through 30 winters with just sheets of canvas between him and the elements, was 87 when he finally checked out! Fuck me! I have been on camping holidays in which I almost died after just two days!!
Contrary to all the blathering in the press and media, little is really known about the late Josef. What IS on record is that he was a Pole who came to England after the Second World War. One surely has to question the state of mind of someone who decided to swap post-war Poland for Wolverhampton. Hitler didn't bomb Wolverhampton - he didn't need to - but Christ knows somebody should!
This seemingly bizarre relocation became somewhat more rational when it was revealed that during good old W. W. I. I. he had not, in fact, fought alongside his persecuted Polish brethren but had taken a long, hard look at his bread, noticed on which side the butter had been spread, and sided with the Germans. Not content with becoming an honorary squarehead for the duration, he went one better and joined the SS!! You would have thought that would have been enough for any budding traitor and all round arsehole but then yesterday one of the few people he ever spoke to, a fellow Pole living in Wolverhampton, described him as "Not one of the nicer members of the SS!" Admit it, you gotta go it some to be labelled the unacceptable face of the SS?!!
Well Joe, not surprisingly you might think, kept his SS background a secret when he moved to Wolverhampton but he needn't have bothered. Any city which is home to such a Nietzscheresque organisation as MENSA (yes, I kid you not!) would doubtless not only have welcomed such a bastard but also made him mayor!!
Life in Blighty seemed to go fairly well for Joe for the next thirty years and there are photos of him, suited, booted and with a dapper haircut, seemingly enjoying life in the Black Country. The arrival in the city (then a town) from across the country of Pither in 1965 did not seem to bother Joe unduly, nor did the commencement of work a few years later on something which was to play a central role in his pensionable years - that bloody ring-road!
By way of a brief digression, the ring-road is one of Wolverhampton's claims to fame. The city, which also boasts a signatory of the American declaration of independence (the fantastically named Button Gwynett), the home of the first set of experimental traffic lights outside London and the only latterly appreciated Slade, has a ring-road which not only took almost thirty years to complete (seriously!) but goes through the middle of the city!!
Anyway, back to Joe. It seems that Pither's increasing presence on the streets in everything from flares or Oxford bags to penny-round collars or polo-neck sweaters did not upset the balance of Joe's mind. The rise of Thatcher through the Tory ranks also failed to disturb him (not surprising, considering his soldiering days!) and he seemed positively unfazed when Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep spent 234 weeks at the top of the charts. No, what apparently tipped old Joe over the edge was when his wife fucked off!

Instead of throwing a party, he there and then took the decision to give up worldly ways and go back to nature - in a battered, tiny old tent aside the St John's stretch of the ring-road. Shaving and regular trips to the barber's became things of the past for him and he shunned all attempts to coax him back into society. Social services did everything they could to bring Joe round to their way of thinking but he was adamant - "I'm happy on the fucking ring-road so fucking leave me a-fucking-lone!!" (only with a Polish accent).
I know Joe used to return to his Anglo Saxon roots when speaking to anyone who stupidly chose to try to communicate with him because a big pal of mine once did a feature on him for the paper on which we both worked (the Express & Star, aka the Distress and Stir, aka the Express & Swastika). Bob, for it was he, was about the best fucking reporter I ever worked with. He was legendary in journalistic circles, as was his dad who was a notorious Fleet Street hack. It was Bob who dubbed the recalcitrant tramp "Fred" for the purposes of this article because he had been unable to extract his real name from him during one of the most entertaining interviews of his Wolverhampton life. The way Bob tells it, the interview ran along the following lines:
"Hello, may I have a quick word with you?"
"Fuck offski!"
"Ha, ha, ha. No, seriously, I just wanted to ask how you are and how you are coping out here?"
"Go shitski yourself, cuntski!"
"If it's not a daft question, why are you living in a tent on a ring-road?"
"Mind your own fuckski business, you wankoffski!"
"What is your name?"
"I shootski you, mother fuckski!"
And so it went on. Working on the basic assumption that "Man who live in tent on ring-road unlikely to have solicitor", Bob duly published a two-page article full of made-up quotes and referring all the time to the tramp as "Fred". Although his real name emerged in later years, he was forever known as Fred to the good folk of the city.

Social services eventually admitted defeat in their attempts to civilise Joe and some years back they took a pragmatic approach to his case and moved in to replace his battered, little tent with a large, brand new one. His reaction to such an unwarranted act of generosity and accommodation was typical of the man:
"Fuck offski, you bastards!! Leave me a-fucking-loneski!!!"
So there he stayed. He became as much a fixture of life in Wolverhampton as the raincoated bloke who used to stand at the top of Darlington Street hurling imaginary stones at passing cars or the loony who used to race round the Mander Centre dressed as a cowboy while clutching a ghetto blaster to his ear. The only contribution Joe was ever asked to make was to ensure that "his" stretch of ring-road reservation was kept clean and tidy and that he did. As you drove home from work you would see him shuffling around, rake or broom in hand, sweeping up the leaves and collecting the litter, litter not left by him, I hasten to add, but by the mindless shitheads who make up about fifty per cent of the population of this city. He had his tent, he had his patch of land and he survived on meals provided by soup kitchens and various charities. Most notable among his benefactors was the Sikh community which revered him greatly, seeing him as some sort of holy man for abandoning the wicked ways of the world to live a simple life.
Now he has gone. Things don't, and will never, seem quite the same anymore. They unceremoniously pulled down his tent soon after his death on Sunday and there is now no trace of where he once lived - but he lives on in my mind. I never thought I would wax lyrical about a former member of the Waffen SS but Joe's story is irresistible - very much a game of two halves, you might say.
Good on you Joe, you curmudgeonly old Nazi git! You did it. They said you shouldn't, that you couldn't, that you mustn't - but you did. Fuck 'em all. You got out of the rat race and you did it your way.
Raise a glass to Joe tonight - Grantham shall not have him.

Little Brain, You've Had A Busy Day.

Homer alone? Not quite!

The very small piece of brain lodged in the very-soon-to-be ex-Mrs Pither's head is causing her trouble again.
I keep urging her to have it removed because, if nothing else, it's a fire hazard. I mean, it's only a matter of time before it short circuits and sets alight all the alcohol-soaked cotton wool, sawdust and pieces of shredded newspaper which pack out the rest of her skull. Mrs P has, however, grown attached to this sliver of tissue and does, in truth, rely on it for autonomic nervous system functions such as digestion and phoning people up for no fucking reason.
Against my better advice, VSTB EW decided to call on this tiny, cranial collection of cells when she did some work on my laptop yesterday morning. Mrs P, having the touch of a rapist, HAS to use a mouse instead of the touchpad and that prompted the following exchanges between lounge and study (I swear the following is true):
"How do you plug it in?" bellowed the bewildered spouse.
"It's wireless, doombrain!!" I shouted back.
"Aaah!! That's clever, isn't it?"
"It certainly never ceases to amaze me."
"It still doesn't work."
"Have you put the wireless plug in the computer?"
"I thought there wasn't a plug."
"THE WIRELESS PLUG!!!!"
"What's a wireless plug?"
"It's a little, oblong piece of plastic with an oblong piece of metal at the end."
"Aah!!............where's the wireless plug."
"On the bottom of the mouse."
"..............uurmm..........uurmm.........no it isn't."
I tramped upstairs to the study, turned the mouse upside down and revealed to the awestruck Mrs P the plug, in a little recess, stuck on a magnet.
"Wow!! That's clever, isn't it?"
I had got halfway back down the stairs when I heard the almost predictable "How on earth do you plug it in?"
Relax, focus, breathe and count to ten, I thought to myself. I trudged back upstairs to find...TRUST ME, THIS IS TRUE...Mrs P repeatedly sliding the mouse over the edge of the computer in a forelorn effort to get the plug underneath to somehow slot into it!!!!
"No, not quite, dear," I said. "The slight error you've made is not to take the plug off the mouse first. See?"
"Wow, that's clever, isn't it?"
"Yes dear. It is, indeed, almost mind boggling. Can I go back downstairs now?"
"Yes. Thanks. I'm ok now."
That'll be the bloody day, I thought. Sure enough, not 30 seconds later, she shouted down "Where do I plug it in?"
'In your fucking head' would be a start, I thought, beginning to get mildly annoyed. "Put it in one of the USB ports!!!!"
There was an ominous silence for a couple of minutes. Now, sometimes it is more comforting to hear VSTB EW wittering on than it is to experience the dreaded silence. You see, whenever there is silence I picture Mrs P, with her tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth and her brow furrowed, concentrating on trying TO DO something - something she shouldn't be doing!!! I was right to worry. The silence was soon broken.
"TAP, KNOCK, KNOCK, BASH, BASH, CRACK, TAP, BASH!!!!!!"
I panicked. "JESUS...H...FUCKING...CHRIST!!! That don't sound right!!" I thought to myself. "What the fuck is going on?"
I raced upstairs and burst into the study to find.......wait for it.......Mrs P using the mouse in an attempt to HAMMER THE WIRELESS PLUG INTO A PHONE SOCKET on the laptop!!!!
"It doesn't fit," she wailed.
"And nor will anything else now! You've also cracked the bleedin' mouse!! Brilliant!!!"
Yes, the phone plug socket is now bent so much it is unusable and the mouse is currently being held together with Sellotape!
My very-soon-to-be unbetrothed's piece of brain sadly kicked in a couple of times more before yesterday was out, notably when she drove to pick me up from doing the shopping in the village. She duly pulled up outside the greengrocer's as arranged but, as the shop assistant and I staggered towards the car with about ten bags of shopping and I reached for the door handle, she promptly drove off, leaving me, said assistant and said groceries standing on the pavement in the rain - for half an hour!!! She finally returned and, when I asked "Why did you drive off, my dearest?" she replied "Oh, I'd just remembered that I needed to go to the Post Office."
As far as Mrs P is concerned, there is truth in that old line "If you had a brain you'd be dangerous". Grantham shall not have her, however.

I Wish I Was A Dog.

Getting out of bed in winter is difficult.
Central heating has made things so much easier.............but you still have to leave that beautiful, warm, cosy bed to delouse yourself and treat yourself to a dawn rectal scrape in the bathroom. Then you have to pull on the comedy rubber badger's costume you need for work. Then you have to take that massive step and open the front door, scrape the ice from the windscreen of the car and dive inside, awaiting the heater to kick in.
Yes, leaving the warmth of your home to face the rigours of the British winter is indeed a shock to the system. It is certainly not helped when you are about to leave the bedroom for the descent into the big freeze, you look back at that gorgeous bed you never wanted to leave......................and you see this.......................

"Explain again what a mortgage is - only later. I'm really tired."


"Yes, bye dear! Turn the light off again would you?"

Sunrise, Upset.

Even our industrial heartland can look beautiful at times - wasn't it a gorgeous sunrise this morning?
Only two things could have possibly spoiled it. One was the knowledge that all the lovely reds and oranges were the result of all the shite and pollutants in the air. The other was the fat, tattooed git in a white Transit van who drew up alongside me and belched: "Teken' a fookin' photy on yower phone while yum drivin'!! Yow want lockin' oop!"
God's speed and have a lovely day. Try not to crash and die horribly. Romance and artistry are, officially, dead!!!

Saint Or Sinner?

Well, that was fun! Lucky pants, lucky shoes and lucky shirt.....all to no avail. It was indeed a bridge too far - but still an exciting game and surely the best rugby World Cup tournament to date. Summat to be proud of at last.
I watched the game at the best pub in the world and a good time was had by all, regardless of the result. In true Birdwatcher fashion, however, I found myself double booked and so at 10pm had to decamp and make a beeline for another pub for a reunion of hacks from a paper I used to work on 13 years ago. There was a late bar in an upstairs room and so the levels were never in danger of dropping too dramatically.
Anyway, I had been there about five minutes and was still in full "Good God! I thought you were dead!!" greetings mode when an attractive woman sidled over to me to say hello. "Hi!" I said, effusively, "How's things?" "I'm fine," she said, "considering you stood me up."
"Yes, well, I'm glad to hear.........what??!?!!"
"You stood me up."
"I'm afraid I don't....I mean....I can't....I mean....what??!?"
"You arranged to meet me in town for a coffee but you never showed up."
"Lord! Sorry about that. Still, time's a great healer, isn't it?"
Jesus!! The smell of boiling rabbit was beginning to fill the air. Was she armed? I was praying the cutlery for the buffet was plastic. After all, I'd left the paper 13 bloody years ago! If that had been the only thing on her mind over the ensuing time then I had a Meryl Streep situation on my hands. It got worse....
"Sorry for asking. I mean, my memory's not what it was, but....well....when exactly was this?"
"1977."
OH FUCK!! OH HOLY JESUS!! SOMEBODY HELP ME, PLEASE!!! I was fucking 17 in 1977! What was going on? Then the mists started to clear. It turned out that she used to hang around with a crowd I did when I was a teenager. She was, as I remember, a quiet, pleasant, pretty little lass but I didn't recall ever trying to ruin her life with the "fancy a coffee some time" prelude to an assault on the north face of her pants.
"Why didn't you show up?" she persisted, alarmingly.
I panicked. I resorted to the old standby - make 'em laugh.
"I don't like coffee," I said.
Not the best gambit I could have chosen, it turned out.
"Then why did you ask me to go for one?"
And some fell on stony ground. Time for Plan B.
"Would you like a sausage roll?"
"No. I waited for two hours."
"Oh, I can get one much quicker than that. They're only over there."
"I forgave you, though."
Thank fuck for that!!
"Goodo. Can I get you a drink? Not a coffee, obviously."
We fell to chatting properly and it turned out that that she was living in Cyprus, had a little one but her significant other had buggered off......I was dying to say "did he nip out for a coffee and just not come back?" but managed to bite my lip in time.
A nice lass - as she always was - but not great on things to say when you haven't seen someone for 13 years.
"I'm stopping at a hotel in town," she said as the night neared its end. "Would you like a nightcap?"
Those two little men suddenly climbed onto my shoulders. You know?......
The little white one with the harp and wings saying "No, no! It's just mindless, meaningless sex without feeling or involvement. You are a beast. Don't even think about it. You are an awful man. You're taking advantage. Haven't you done enough to ruin this poor girl's life? Be a gentleman. Take her back in a taxi and just give her a peck on the cheek goodnight."
Then there was the little red one with the pointy tale and the horns saying "Go on! Fuck her brains out!! Of course it's mindless, meaningless sex without feeling or involvement. That's why you should dip your wick. She's lonely and awash with nostalgia. Her pants are hanging by a thread. You know you want to. Go on!!! Do it!!!!!"
I shall leave the story there. I am too much of either a) a gentleman or b) a sexual inadequate to say more.