A New Revised List of Prophecies Signifying the Arrival of a, Possibly The, Messiah

Having read somewhere that all religions are death cults, Pope Mountebank I, Spiritual Leader of the Televisual Congregation of the Modern Day, decided to test his supposition that all he really needed to get things cooking was a New Revised List of Prophecies Signifying the Arrival of a, Possibly The, Messiah (succinctness had never been a forte).

A New Revised List of Prophecies Signifying the Arrival of a, Possibly The, Messiah

from The New New Testament’s Godspell accordingly to St Jean-Luc Picard

A, possibly The, Messiah will be born with a tattoo of the letter “M” (but where?!). Said tattoo will be yellow on a red background, proving that he is a, possibly The, Messiah (“M” for Messiah, as all of his biographies will be called), and that he is also one of the people (re: having a tattoo; being sponsored by McDonald’s; and similar things). A, Possibly The, Messiah will be called Gavin or Wayne or, and here’s the important part, something like that. Gavin/Wayne/Similar/A/The Messiah will be an obscurantist demagogue much enamoured of greeting-card philosophy and reality television. He will wear sumptuously exquisite clothes from George @ Asda and his general manner will be arrogant, almost to the point of humility. His opponents, of which there will be many, will all be servile, disobliging contrarians who only manage to get through life by practising an unattractive combination of caprice, bravura and pretending that they don’t vote Tory. Gavin/Wayne/Similar/A/The Messiah will bring an end to the world (but how?), during which his devout and right-about-everything followers will laugh and sing and dance because everyone else is having to watch re-runs of “Sarah Beeny’s Selling Houses” for all eternity.

All of which is true, so sign up now.

Response: Hang on, are we the sheep?

The Existential Bicycle is in Wales for the Weekend

The existential bicycle traverses

the u-shaped valley. He consents to having

his photo taken for an article

about The Joys of Mountain Biking in

The Peak District, despite the fact that he

is not a mountain bike and finds no joy

in mountain biking. Checking on his sat-nav,

the existential bicycle discovers

that Wales is not a part of The Peak District.

He leans against a chapel wall and wonders

why he no longer finds the landscape awe-

inspiring. All he thinks of now is Holland,

and how it is that existential bikes

appear to lack free will. “I’m sick of hills,”

he thinks, and starts to climb another hill.

The Existential Bicycle Defies the Laws of Gravity

The existential bicycle defies

the laws of gravity. It floats as if

it is in space or on the surface of

the Moon. The music in the background waits,

and leaves the existential bicycle

to wonder briefly when he will wake up.

Dreams and the Existential Bicycle

The existential bicycle appears

to Jesus in a dream. “Take up your wheels

and spin!” commands The Bearded-Sandalled One.

The existential bicycle exists

beyond “The Dream of Jesus and the Bike.”

The existential bicycle rides up

and down and dreams of being on the flats.

Belief and the Existential Bicycle

The existential bicycle believes

there must be more to life than ups and downs.

The holiday on Holland’s flats has left

the existential bicycle believing

that “more-to-life” exists upon those flats

and not the endless ups and downs of old.

The Existential Bicycle Takes a Holiday

The existential bicycle decides

it needs a holiday and takes itself

to Holland where the horizontality

impresses greatly. Not since Norfolk has

the bicycle been treated to such flatness. 

Based on a True Story

Sad but true, she’d said.

Sad. But. True.

From this, I deduce (incorrectly, as it turned out) that I should tell her a lie to cheer her up (what with the truth making her sad, and all that).

“I once had a number 1 hit in Norway,” I say. Norway? “I mean Denmark,” I correct myself. Denmark? What’s the sodding difference? Norway, Denmark. Denmark, Norway. They’re completely interchangeable in the minds of people who haven’t read their history books, especially ones about the Second World War (me, for starters). I may as well have stuck with Norway. “Actually, I think it was Norway and Denmark,” I elaborate, digging yet deeper. “I think the Scandinavian countries decided to collate their record sales in the 70s or 80s,” I say, inanely, “after ‘Norwegian Wood’ became Denmark’s best-ever selling single; it only reached number 11 in the Norwegian charts, thanks to a campaign not to buy it, orchestrated by the Norwegian Society of Ironists. The Norwegian Phonographic Industry were hugely embarrassed and persuaded Denmark to jump into bed with them, so to speak.” I’m quite bored (or possibly exhausted) by all my lying, so shut up.

“Well then, you must have had a number 1 hit in Sweden as well,” she says.

“Why must I have had a number 1 hit in Sweden as well?” I ask. “That doesn’t follow.”

“Because Sweden is a Scandinavian country…” she says in her ‘Derr, ficko!’ voice.

“So what,” I say.

“Well, you said that the Scandinavian countries put all their record sales together, or something,” she answers.

Geography books as well as history books. Oh, dear.  “Sweden refused to join in,” I explain. This part, at least, is partially true (not the refusing to join, but the fact of not joining; there was nothing to join, so how could they?).

She looks at me with her ‘Oh, yeah?’ face, eyes wide with incredulity (not to mention the folded arms, the leaning back in the chair: the Full Treatment).

“Denmark and Norway refused to buy any records by ABBA as a protest…” against what? Think! “…against Sweden’s continued involvement in the slave trade, which meant that ABBA would never have had any number 1s on their home soil – which is mainly rock and ice, I think – and the Swedish Pornographic Industry would never have stood for that.”

“Sweden’s Pornographic Industry?” she squeals, emphasizing the ‘graph’ in pornographic. I consider making an inappropriate, graph-based joke, but decide that enough is enough.

“All right, all right,” I say. “I didn’t really have a number 1 hit in Scandinavia; I was just trying to cheer you up.”

“Come here, you,” she says in her you’re a lap-dog voice.

I do as I am bid, but as I get up to cross to her, she gets up and leaves.

“Twit,” she mutters, leaving me dumbfounded, or it confounded?

By the time I have gathered what passes for my wits, I call after her, “No, but I really did once have a number 7 hit in Romania!” but she is out of earshot, so I ask the barman for another pint of bitter. “Only, this time, leave out the freshly squeezed lemon juice,” I say. “As far as fusion beverages go, I’m not sure it worked.”

“Would you like the freshly squeezed juice of a kumquat with that?” he asks.

I laugh at his suggestion, but nod my head in agreement.

“Let’s go mad!” I shout, and jump off a cliff. 

Although, now that I come to think of it, it might have been a bar-stool.

In the Spychiatrist’s Chair

I explain to my spychiatrist that the phrase psychiatrist’s chair is a misnomer, as it is the psychiatrist who sits in the psychiatrist’s chair: the psychiatrist’s patient sits in the psychiatrist’s patient’s chair, not in the psychiatrist’s chair.

“Don’t you mean spychiatrist?” she asks.

I suspect humour is afoot, and I laugh. I find my laughter to be unwelcome, like a mouthful of cream bun of Day Four of Your Latest Diet.

My spychiatrist tells me about a new offer: All You Can Say for £150 with a free diagnosis at the end. I tell her that I can do this at home by saying all I want to my bedroom wall and then diagnosing myself as having Borderline Personality Disorder, all for less than a tenner.

We move on to the subject of medication. “Polo mints, fruits pastilles or Jacob’s cream crackers,” she says, and hands me a leaflet to read. I learn that an added benefit of Jacob’s cream crackers is that they deter dragon attacks. This is news to me.

“I’ve been reading your blog,” she says. I am so slow on the uptake. Spychiatrist. Of course.

I have to explain to her that the spychiatrist in the blog is not the same as the spychiatrist I see in front of me, and that the narrator in the blog isn’t really with it. I explain that I’m getting fed up with having to construct sentence after sentence of indirect speech which, as the astute reader will have observed, is how I report what I have said whilst I am at the spychiatrist’s; the spychiatrist is the only one of us whose speech is reported directly (apart from the odd italicized phrase which indicates direct speech from me). I explain that I don’t think the spychiatrist in the blog is really saying enough.

I wonder whose fault this is.

“So, you’d like me to say more for this blog?” she asks.

I explain that this would be very helpful, or possibly useless, depending on what she says. And all the while she’s listening to me, she isn’t talking, leaving all the work to me. But such is the nature of spychiatry that I fear she may not be able to make any contribution beyond the occasional open-ended question.

“Have you noticed the time?” she asks.

I glance at the clock, get up, and leave, slamming the door on my way out. I kick the bannisters on the way down the stairs, misspelling the word “banisters” in my fury, and, quite literally, throw my toys out of the pram, metaphorically speaking.

Later, I realize that banister can be spelt bannister or banister, and I send my spychiatrist a can of Pepsi Max by way of apology, with a note which says, “Don’t read anything into that remark about Pepsi Max by the way; it’s just a coincidence.”

Perhaps I should feature more apology notes; they seems to be more loquacious than spychiatrists. 

In the Cultural Bargain Bin Today, We Have

Life deodorant,

Not the truth,

Simon Cowell’s

Cloven hoof.

Books about

Some tragic life,

Last week’s girlfriend/

Next week’s wife.

Racist jokes

From ITV,

(Autumn Nineteen-

Eighty-Three).

Pirate-copied

Barbie dolls,

Fatalistic

Exit polls.

Teenage games

Of Truth or Dare,

Elton John’s

Bionic hair.

Shark-infested

Legal teams,

This week’s nightmares/

Last week’s dreams.

Answers from

The Great Beyond,

Harry Potter’s

Flaccid wand.

All the tat

You’ll never need,

Last year’s savings/

This week’s greed.

Cauterized

Aesthetic taste?

Welcome to

The Human Waste.

(After Byron Vincent's "Bargain Runt", which you can find in his

book, "Barking Doggerel".)

Introvert/Extrovert

Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

Introverts like socks, complain about having to do the washing-up and support Manchester United.

Extroverts live in semi-detached properties, are allergic to most things and can’t make their minds up about curtains.

Still not sure which one you are?

Look at the lists below. If you share a birthday, eye colour or shoe size with any of them, then that’s you!

Famous introverts include Mae West, The Invisible Man, Brian Clough and George Harrison.

Famous extroverts include Dracula, Sir Margaret Thatcher, Bob the Builder and George Harrison.

Of course, some people are neither introvert nor extrovert. These people are called inverted snobs and they live in places with a ‘Y’ in them (like Newcastle).

Next Week: Are You For Us or Against Us?

Sesquipedalicons

sesquipedalicon, neologism (intransitive portmanteau 'sesquipedalian + emoticon'): an emoticon which is too complex to be expressed as a series of twee punctuation marks, and whose characters thus have to be translated into, or expressed as, words (see ‘paradox’ if in danger of taking this definition too seriously).

E.g. “As an historical document, Blackadder displays exactly the sort of inaccuracies which one would associate with a Stalinist state #missingthepoint @*sententious face*.”

Having trawled the net exhaustively on Google for eight minutes, here are the best sesquipedalicons which I have encountered so far, mainly on twatter, but also on Falseberk and other anti-social media shites. In keeping with the Oxford English Dictionary's convention, I have typed the sesquipedalicons between asterisks and in bold type. 

‘Tis with our judgment as our watches, none

Go just alike, yet each believes his own – #AlexanderPope @*apophthegmatic face*

Things moving really slowly #tryingtolosemyvirginity @*fluvioglacial face*

Just found some photographs of my great-grandfather in a box in the attic! *chromolithographic face*

Can anybody tell me how “Hamlet” influenced “Catch 22”? #PhDsaintwhattheyusedtobe@ *intertextual face*

Cough! Splutter! #ihopeidonthavelungcancer @*pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiositic face*

The shit just hit the fan #francoishollande @*excremental face*

I’ve just seen my double! #mirrorseverywhere @*doppelganger face*

Just seen David Cameron! #ifeelsick @*oleaginous face*

Ice-Cream

How well I remember that window of twenty minutes in my childhood when our mother was in a good mood. Not the pretend good mood she used for birthdays and the occasional Christmas, and which Brother and I could see through as easily as if it was a broken window (like the one he smashed with grandfather’s air-rifle once, as a bet with the gardener), but an actual, proper good mood. A good mood like we experienced when we went round to a friend’s house and were allowed, by the friend’s Mum (Mum?! such informality!) to eat Heinz tinned spaghetti for lunch, instead of the brown wholewheat spaghetti with lumpy, virtually inedible bolognaise sauce, which no-one was allowed to leave unfinished, and which was standard fare at our house.

We had stopped off in a small town on the way to Cornwall for our annual festival of misery: Camping in August. Our mother bought an ice-cream for Brother and me, but there were no fights; no “You can have an ice-cream as long as it’s in a flavour you hate”; no “And none of that disgusting Mr Whippy muck which isn’t even ice-cream”. Just, “Would you like an ice-cream?” Smile.

“Would you like an ice-cream?” Smile. What on earth could that mean?

Brother and I looked at each other; waiting for the catch; waiting to be shouted at for saying the wrong thing; for choosing a flavour which was morally reprehensible.

I had initially gone for vanilla, a flavour which I knew might win some fleeting maternal approval, while Brother, always infinitely more daring than I, had initially gone for the infinitely more daring and morally corrupt chocolate, probably because he had a death wish or something and was always seeing what latest madness he could get away with.

“Oh, why don’t you choose something different?” she suggested.

As always, it was Brother who went first. “Mint chocolate chip, please,” he confidently asked. God, how did he do it? Had ever a phrase been uttered in the English language which contained such bravery, such wanton disregard for personal safety? I waited for the familiar smack to the side of the head; the instant eruption of Brother’s anger and his floods of tears and my subsequent wish to be invisible or dead; the “Right, back in the car!” or similar.

Instead, she said, “Of course.”

I was eventually cajoled into asking for rum and raisin, a flavour which I had long wanted to try, and the flavour which, as an adult, I will always choose, whenever the need to pick a flavour of ice-cream arises.

We sat and ate our ice-creams in nervous silence, wolfing them down before mother realized the terrible mistake she had made; before she had a chance to confiscate them; before she had a chance to find a health food shop and buy something brown and wholefood to counteract the deleterious effect of those ice-creams.

Years later, when she had given up all pretence of actually liking us and had sent us to board in a loveless and austere boarding school at the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors, so that she could get a really good, uninterrupted suntan in Dubai for four years, she would take us to Baskin Robins for a treat (during the two holidays a year, when, for a total of seven weeks, Brother and I were allowed to share in the endless sun of the ex-patriot lifestyle before being sent back to the rainswept misery of Colditz). Baskin Robbins was an ice-cream parlour which didn’t do morally acceptable flavours at all, and was our first experience of the dizzyingly delightful vulgarity of American culture. All the other displaced British nationals went there, and our being allowed to go was a case of when in Rome, do as the ex-pats do rather than any personality volte face on the part of Mother.

By this time, Brother and my roles had undergone something of a reversal: he was dutiful and obliging; I was an adolescent nightmare. I always went for either peanut butter and chocolate, as it was the second most decadent, immoral and unchristian ice-cream flavour they had, or bubblegum, because it looked like it had the least nutritional value  of anything in the known universe (and because it was pink).

Years later, I bought my oldest son his first holiday ice-cream, when he was four-years-old: a Mr Whippy double cone. We sat on a bench, while Son attempted to eat his ice-cream, about 65% of which melted and dribbled all over his arms, his t-shirt, his shorts, and his skinny, four-year-old legs. I looked at this vision of childhood gluttony, ecstatic at the exuberant, extravagant, wasteful stickiness of it all.

Later on, when no-one was looking, I bought one for myself.

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

Happiness

for Everyone

“We are not put on earth to be happy but to ensure

The effective production of Daihatsu Hatchbacks”

Peter Porter (Civilization and its Disney Contents)

(i)

Do not expect the whoop of happiness

to be a true companion; try, instead,

to reconcile yourself to misery,

for you and I are failures (are we not?)

and misery is failure’s wretched son.

(ii)

Maybe I oversimplify, for sake

of being candid (please excuse this fault).

I could be wrong, but if we all agree

on stanza (i), perhaps the joint acceptance

might bring us all a pinch of happiness?

(iii)

Alternatively, bomb around the town

proclaiming, “I am happy! I am happy!”

when clearly you are not. Your rictal mask

won’t fool us partners from the Dismal Bloc.

If you agree, please let me know. Who’s with me?

Meanwhile, Back at the Spychiatrist

As I painted the inside of my… no, wait: I can’t paint. I made a mood collage using the words which I am no longer allowed to say, but this had no effect whatsoever, so I nailed seven balloons on to the surface of a bowl of uncooked rice. No explanation is required to explain the failure of this approach.

I disguised last night’s argument… wait: not yet. I practised nodding sagely so that the next time somebody uses an obscure word out of context, like semiotics, I would be able to disguise my discomfort by appearing like a well-practised, nodding sage. While I waited for that to happen, I disguised last night’s argument as a triumph for common sense. There. Timing.

I pondered whether or not I would be drawn into reminiscing about the bad old days with a recently deceased friend who had accidentally come to stay. This was dismissed.

Last night, I tried to discover if I was Welsh. By this morning, I had misplaced this notion and so was back to being, what: Spanish? I can’t even remember my own nationality now, let alone the precise location of my children.

It is time for my spychiatrist to make some sort of sense.

“Do you think that you have you been making much sense recently?” she asks. “For example, the last 206 words?” I explain to her that I always make sense to me, and that if other people are having difficulty making sense then they always have the option of exiting the page. Metaphorically, of course.

“But you can’t exit the page…” I am not sure if this is a question, an unfinished sentence, or a taunt. I interpret it as an unfinished sentence and complete it for her. Because, I say. Unfortunately, I have no idea why I can’t exit the page and so we are stuck, the spychiatrist and I, in the unspoken space of my own cognitive incompetence.

I ask her if it has anything to do with penguins. I am clutching at straws. Or maybe penguins.

There is another silence. It occupies the space between us, a bit like the unwanted laughter which escapes from your lips when you are told of someone’s untimely death... which is a sentence so flawed that it's difficult to know where to begin.

“Why do you think of me as your spychiatrist?” she asks, but I tell her that I have no idea what she is talking about and counter her question by asking her how she knows my thoughts.

“It rather helps that you tell me what they are,” she explains.

“Why do you think your attempts at avoiding depression failed?” my spychiatrist asks, finally making some sort of sense of the first 206 words.

But I am surprised that she has to even ask, and I rise to leave, feeling slightly guilty that I had to split an infinitive, even when not to have done so would have sounded unnatural. Even has to ask. Maybe it wouldn’t have sounded so forced after all.

I go home and burn all of my grammar books.

Heaven Knows Bigmouth Strikes Again

Reclusive author, God, has announced a new book. The NME went to interview him.

God says, “Like undrinkable coffee, my forgiveness is instant.”

He is trying to be accessible, but as anyone who has ever read any of his books will know, God’s gnomic style can seem a little contrived; in speech, this is even more so. Has he, I wonder, developed a Morrissey complex during his long absence from the world of letters?

“Well, I suppose one’s life would be a bit more interesting if one did. But no, of course I haven’t. No. Life is too short for such futile endeavours…” The sentence tails off, and God looks into the distance. “Although I did quite like ‘The Queen is Dead’,” he smiles.

I ask God the inevitable question (Where’ve you been?), but already he looks bored; bored and slightly agitated. He shifts uncomfortably in his seat. We are sitting on two rather functional chairs in his hotel room (Premier Inn, Leicester: where else?). It is God’s fifth interview of the day. He clears his throat and then does a little sort of hum before answering.  “When things go wrong, I tend to make myself scarce; not that you’d notice, as I am, for the main part, invisible.” He hasn’t really answered my question yet. I decide to see where he is going with his answer. “If I turn up for you, then I have to turn up for everybody, but it’s just not realistic anymore. You can’t simply come running to me because you’ve …” here, God pauses, almost stumbles, then becomes animated and uses his fingers as quotation marks, “…‘got pancreatic cancer’ or because your child has ‘gone missing’.”

I am about to ask why not, then remember who it is that I am talking to.

“I hope I’m making myself understood,” he says. Is this what it’s all about, then? Setting the record straight. Despite the fact that he didn’t answer my previous question, I decide to go for another big one. Which religion is right?

God looks at me. He looks disappointed. He looks away, out of the window. “Surely everybody knows that by now?” he asks, exasperated, but before I have a chance to say that everybody doesn’t know, he mentions the new book. “It’s going to be amazing,” he says, momentarily brightening up. Going to be? I ask. Having waited all this time, God turns up with news of a new book which he hasn’t even written, yet?! “It’s not as straightforward as that. There’s the issue of the ghost-writer, and…”

Of course. I barely hear what God says next, as I digest this news. It makes sense. After all, everything else ‘written’ by God was ghost-written, so why not the new book?

I drift back into what God is saying. The clock has ticked ominously on, and our interview is almost at an end. “I have a publisher and a title; everything else is just window dressing,” he says.

I ask him who? and what? “Penguin Modern Classics,” he says in answer to the first one, and “Autobiography” in answer to the second.

Only Morrissey, I quip, gets his autobiography published in Penguin Classics.

God does not seem amused.

The interview ends, and I wonder what next for this reclusive and troubled individual. A career in hairdressing, perhaps?

Six Impossible Things before Breakfast

1 “Lean on Me” is a love song from a lamp-post to a bicycle.

2 “I’ve Got You Under My Sink” is the most downloaded song from the Cole Porter Songbook for Dyslexic Sociopaths.

3 Paul (now Sporl) McCartney wrote “Hey Jude!” for his then Jewish girlfriend, wot’serface (oh, come on; someone other than me has to find this joke funny eventually, for fuck’s sake).

4 When thinking of a stage-name, thingummyjig, who, as we all know, went on to find fame and embarrassment as Adam Ant, considered calling himself Percy Stent or Henry Lenting.

5 The surname of the girl made famous in the Duran Duran song “Rio” was not, ironically, de Janeiro; no, it was Tact. She later married Jim Kerr.

6 Mick (now Smick) Jagger is a fake. The real Smick Jagger has been sitting in the House of Lords since 1961. Everything about the fake Smick Jagger is fake, apart from – and you will laugh at this – his accent. That’s right, the only authentic thing about the fake Smick Jagger is his voice. And his knighthood, which he was awarded for servicing to women.

Next week: Six Unlikely Things at Bedtime

Meet the Spychiatrist

I explain to my spychiatrist that I think I may have been a coffee-table in a previous life/existence (one can’t call being a coffee-table a ‘life’, so I say life and then add existence as an afterthought).

“Really?” she asks.

The no which I offer is backed up by the explanation that I had wanted to say something suitably interesting to a person in her profession; I fear that if I tell her something as mundane as how I feel she might become bored. I don’t want to waste her time. It tell her that the coffee-table claim had reminded me of the occasion of my First Confession (not that I am a master criminal, it’s just that my parents tried to bring me up as a Catholic): the priest had asked me what sins I had committed, and I had not wanted to waste his time with a list of minor, petty infarctions.

My spychiatrist politely interrupts me with an observation. “You mean infractions,” she says, and then explains the difference between the two. I am too polite to tell her that I am aware of the difference.

During my First Confession, I had been worried about disappointing the priest with a list of minor, petty infractions (infarctions is the better word), and so I tell him that I like trying to bend the pins on plugs, thus making it difficult, though not impossible, to insert them into the wall sockets. The priest had asked me why I did this, which I hadn’t realized was part of the bargain, so I had said the first thing which had come into my head, namely, I don’t know.

I stop talking at this point.

The silence sits there like a poorly constructed simile.

“What happened next?” my spychiatrist asks, but I tell her that I can’t remember.

I tell my spychiatrist that I secretly refer to her as my spychiatrist.

“Do you think that I am spying on you?” she asks.

I explain to her that spychiatrist sounds better than psychiatrist and am just about to add like infarction sounds better than infraction, but I notice the time, gather my thoughts, and leave.

I realize, as I walk to the bus-stop, that I never shared such intimacies with my spychologist. 

Marilyn Monroe’s Piano

George Michael paid a million pounds

to buy John Lennon’s white “Imagine”

piano, a purchase that’s not hard

to understand. Imagine playing

“Imagine” on that piano. Quite

a heady thrill, one would imagine.

Mariah Carey shelled out more

than half-a-million dollars so

that she could buy a piano which

had once belonged to Marilyn Monroe

because she felt a ‘close connection’

to the star. But why buy her piano?

Standing on the Sidelines Booing

Many people spend their whole lives standing on the sidelines booing,

Like cows mooing.

Peculiarly Normal

Peculiar to witless dullards:

the claim that they are “really mad!!!!”

or “wild!!!” or, worst of all, they’re “zany!!!!!!!!!”

And yet they always dress quite plainly,

their hair is rarely ever green,

their words are crass and quite mundane.

If anything, they’re far too sane.

Eccentric? Emphatically not.

As unconventional as toast.

It’s surely rather dim to boast

that you are something when you’re not.

Witless dullards: please take note.