I even walked a few hundred yards further along the beach to escape the plebs. It was a sunny evening last night, and I found myself in Bridport, so popped along to the beach at West Bay for an early evening dip. The first and probably the only dip of the year.
Got me kit off and left it on a flat rock, as you do, and did my best to get in the sea without howling too much when the first wave hit my bollocks.
Of course, until I got in the water, the beach was deserted - at least that part of it was. But sod me, no sooner had I got my tits wet, the place was swarming with dogs, all pissing and crapping everywhere. Some of them investigating my backpack stood on the rock, and considering it for use as an object to cock their leg and piss on.
Twice I had to get out and shout at canines who looked like they were too interested, while their owners just looked at me bemused. Fucking dog owners - why don't they react when their hounds are doing this. How would they like it if they were sitting on the beach and I came up and started sniffing round their stuff and got me cock out? Yeah, I suppose I'd be arrested, but you know what I mean. They just amble along yapping to their friend or whatever, while their whole pack of wild dogs wreak havoc, squatting and cocking wherever they feel like it.
Honestly, there were more dogs than people on that beach. Three or four people had eight dogs with them - I counted - all in the same area of beach that I had chosen as being peaceful and ideal for a a brief dip. That's all I wanted - a brief peaceful dunk in the sea, so I could say at least I'd been in once this year.
Can't even have a few minutes, uninterrupted, on a fucking three mile beach at 7 in the evening. Bastards - all of them.
Wednesday, 19 August 2015
Friday, 16 December 2011
The shame of it
Some people have no shame - I was in M&S at Waterloo a couple of nights ago, before catching a train home. There was a woman standing in the aisle, bolting down a sandwich, cramming it into her mouth as other customers reached past her for their sandwich purchases. She looked like a regular commuter. She left the packaging on the shelf and left the shop without paying.
Then, on the train, I watched a bloke (late 30s/early 40s) as he sat on the luggage shelf in full view of the whole carriage, digging away at his nose, and transferring the bogies straight into his mouth.
In the words of Derek and Clive, 'if that's the fucking peerage, what's the house of commons like?'
Then, on the train, I watched a bloke (late 30s/early 40s) as he sat on the luggage shelf in full view of the whole carriage, digging away at his nose, and transferring the bogies straight into his mouth.
In the words of Derek and Clive, 'if that's the fucking peerage, what's the house of commons like?'
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Don't bounce!
ASDA supermarket, Wembley Park. One of those garden trampolines with the safety net cage around it stands in the entrance lobby with a £99 price tag, as a store promotion.
Also attached is a notice that reads: 'Attention: for health and safety reasons, please do not sit or bounce on the trampoline.'
What can you say, really?
Also attached is a notice that reads: 'Attention: for health and safety reasons, please do not sit or bounce on the trampoline.'
What can you say, really?
Friday, 27 May 2011
Frankenstein’s monster
I’ve seen it all now.
On the tube yesterday, coming up the escalator was a bloke with a bald head. Not that a bloke with a bald head is a revelation, but I mention the slap-head appearance in order to give you a mental picture of the vision with which I was confronted.
Smartly dressed, intelligent-looking (at least he probably was) but when you walk around the capital with Bluetooth deaf-aid wireless mobile phone antenna sticking out of EACH lug-hole, one is prone to looking like a complete fucking idiot.
He looked fucking ridiculous. Like someone had taken a magician’s wand and hammered it through his head, via the ears, until it protruded on the other side. Yul Brinner with handlebars on his head. What a git. Like Frankenstein with the bolts in the wrong place. Like a huge nob with a big nail through the helmet.
Was it to get perfect stereo balance and have the voices directly inside his head? Or was it to have more than one call on the go at any time? Maybe if two calls came in simultaneously, we would see him spinning round talking to himself left and right.
Either way, he looked like a right nob.
So did the transvestite on the platform at Baker Street. Dressed in a leopard print coat with a matching Thunderbirds hat and shirt in electric blue satin and high heeled shoes. Fantastic. The world needs freaks like these!
On the tube yesterday, coming up the escalator was a bloke with a bald head. Not that a bloke with a bald head is a revelation, but I mention the slap-head appearance in order to give you a mental picture of the vision with which I was confronted.
Smartly dressed, intelligent-looking (at least he probably was) but when you walk around the capital with Bluetooth deaf-aid wireless mobile phone antenna sticking out of EACH lug-hole, one is prone to looking like a complete fucking idiot.
He looked fucking ridiculous. Like someone had taken a magician’s wand and hammered it through his head, via the ears, until it protruded on the other side. Yul Brinner with handlebars on his head. What a git. Like Frankenstein with the bolts in the wrong place. Like a huge nob with a big nail through the helmet.
Was it to get perfect stereo balance and have the voices directly inside his head? Or was it to have more than one call on the go at any time? Maybe if two calls came in simultaneously, we would see him spinning round talking to himself left and right.
Either way, he looked like a right nob.
So did the transvestite on the platform at Baker Street. Dressed in a leopard print coat with a matching Thunderbirds hat and shirt in electric blue satin and high heeled shoes. Fantastic. The world needs freaks like these!
EAT SHIT AND DIE
I wrote this last September, but didn't actually get around to publishing here. Because I couldn't be arsed. And then I forgot. But here it is anyway, albeit nine months after the fact:
I’m here in the US, stuck in Washington Dulles airport. Or should that be Washington’s Dullest airport? En route to New York in an hour or so, to kill some time I have indulged in a ‘Five Guys’ bacon cheeseburger and Cajun fries, and now find myself writing some more crap while eating more crap. Well, as fast food crap goes, I have to admit this is somewhat better than the usual McDonalds/Burger King crap. They are probably just there for show, but in front of the counter are several half hundredweight bags of spuds, with a notice stating the name of the local Virginia farm they have been sourced from.
I’ve been here since the beginning of the week, and it’s now Saturday. I’m no stranger to American food culture, having been here a few times over the years, but I’ve always – at least to some extent – accepted that the food is so much more processed than that we are used to eating in the UK. Accepted, that is, until now.
Fuck me, is there nothing in this country’s culinary output that does not contain a plethora of chemicals, additives, minerals, vitamins, soya, artificial flavours, sweeteners, colourings and other such shite?
I bought a bottle of ‘pure’ water yesterday, thinking that it would be spring water bottled at source somewhere, like Colorado. It was purified water. In other words, it could have come out of a fucking drain pipe, or a Mississippi swamp. And it contained ‘minerals for improved flavour’. Christ, even the pure water isn’t pure – it has been fucked around with by adding some sort of unnecessary shit to it. It’s supposed to be water – why can’t they just leave it at that? I don’t drink water for any flavour, I drink it to quench my thirst and stay hydrated, and flush out my kidneys etc.
Unless you can find some sort of organic heath food shop – not easy in the US, at least not in the deep south of Alabama, where I’ve been visiting friends – everything you eat contains a list of ingredients longer than your arm, that do not relate to any food I’ve ever heard of. Sulphites, sulphates, potassium this, alluminium that. Fucking hell! Alluminium! What are they doing? Grinding up old saucepans into the food?
At a hotel in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the other day, we came down for the ‘free hot breakfast’. Some greasy little strip of bacon, and what was supposed to be an omelet – which was in a neatly stacked pile of perfectly sized and folded little pancake-looking egg and cheese type of deal. There were no marks where the frying an had crisped up a bit of egg – all these ‘omelets’ were uniform in size, and without evidence of it having been anywhere near a pan. There was some kind of bread available for toasting – looked like eggy bread. I asked the black lady who laid out the breakfast what it was exactly, but she wasn’t even sure. She said somebody else made it and froze it, then posted it out to her. Nothing here was actually cooked on the premises – the same thing must have applied to the so-called eggs and bacon. All out of a packet and into the microwave. The thing is, the fucker wasn’t even warm, let alone hot. I had to get it microwaved again. Also, what really bugs me, apart from the fact they didn’t produce anything other than shit out of a bag, was that all the cutlery and plates were plastic and Styrofoam – the lazy bastards could not even be bothered to use proper utensils and wash up. No, just chuck it all in a binbag and bury it in the landfill. Just one ‘breakfast room’ in one hotel, in one town, in one state in America – just think of all the plastic everyday, getting binned off all over the country, just in the average motel/hotel, not to mention any other food outlet, like fuel stations, and takeaways. All because the bastards are too lazy to fill a dishwasher and press a button.
And the coffee. Fucking hell, the coffee. Now I’m quite partial to a good cup of coffee. In fact I love the stuff, and take great pride in the daily ritual of making my brew in the morning, using only the best Brazilian beans and all that nonsense. Well, here at this hotel, there were five different jugs containing coffee on display, but only one of them had a label saying it contained decaffeinated
I managed to find some ‘regular’ food the other day – a bag of crisps. ‘Classic’ potato chips. The ingredients read, potatoes, salt, sunflower/corn oil, no preservatives or additives, and that was it. About 4000 calories a bag, mind, but at least it was real food ingredients. As soon as you looked at a flavoured variety, the ingredient list became the now familiar long list of stuff I would normally associate with a chemistry lesson back in school.
Go to a diner, or a burger joint, or just about anywhere for that matter, and look at the ridiculous choice of different shit you can ingest. Down south, it’s stuff like fried chicken, chicken fried chicken, chicken fried steak, grits, biscuits with gravy. Yes, biscuits with gravy. Basically, it’s a dried up old scone with a dollop of congealed wallpaper paste dumped on it. Chicken fried chicken, we had assumed, was a chicken that had cooked another one of its own. A sort of cannabalism, whereas a chicken fried steak was a piece of cow, fried by a chicken. Impressive stuff. But the waitress in the Holly Springs diner put us straight. “we fry EVERYTHING down here in the south”.
Chicken fried chicken, apparently, is boneless chicken, as opposed to fried chicken, which is chicken with a bone in. Usually with some sort of ‘finger-lickin’ batter turdy stuff around it. Chicken fried steak, on the other hand, is a piece of beef fried (presumably without bones) and covered in battery turdy stuff again.
And of course, the chickens won’t be just chickens – they will be full of growth promoting hormones, added water, flavour enhancers and other shit.
So there you go. They fry everything – even Snickers bars, just like those Scotch twats. Down in the Mississippi Delta they appear to be obsessed with fried chicken. It’s just about all they eat. Apart from perhaps, the odd Corn Dog. That, I think, is a hot dog on a stick, covered in mushed up sweetcorn and battery turdy stuff, then deep fried.
I’m here in the US, stuck in Washington Dulles airport. Or should that be Washington’s Dullest airport? En route to New York in an hour or so, to kill some time I have indulged in a ‘Five Guys’ bacon cheeseburger and Cajun fries, and now find myself writing some more crap while eating more crap. Well, as fast food crap goes, I have to admit this is somewhat better than the usual McDonalds/Burger King crap. They are probably just there for show, but in front of the counter are several half hundredweight bags of spuds, with a notice stating the name of the local Virginia farm they have been sourced from.
I’ve been here since the beginning of the week, and it’s now Saturday. I’m no stranger to American food culture, having been here a few times over the years, but I’ve always – at least to some extent – accepted that the food is so much more processed than that we are used to eating in the UK. Accepted, that is, until now.
Fuck me, is there nothing in this country’s culinary output that does not contain a plethora of chemicals, additives, minerals, vitamins, soya, artificial flavours, sweeteners, colourings and other such shite?
I bought a bottle of ‘pure’ water yesterday, thinking that it would be spring water bottled at source somewhere, like Colorado. It was purified water. In other words, it could have come out of a fucking drain pipe, or a Mississippi swamp. And it contained ‘minerals for improved flavour’. Christ, even the pure water isn’t pure – it has been fucked around with by adding some sort of unnecessary shit to it. It’s supposed to be water – why can’t they just leave it at that? I don’t drink water for any flavour, I drink it to quench my thirst and stay hydrated, and flush out my kidneys etc.
Unless you can find some sort of organic heath food shop – not easy in the US, at least not in the deep south of Alabama, where I’ve been visiting friends – everything you eat contains a list of ingredients longer than your arm, that do not relate to any food I’ve ever heard of. Sulphites, sulphates, potassium this, alluminium that. Fucking hell! Alluminium! What are they doing? Grinding up old saucepans into the food?
At a hotel in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the other day, we came down for the ‘free hot breakfast’. Some greasy little strip of bacon, and what was supposed to be an omelet – which was in a neatly stacked pile of perfectly sized and folded little pancake-looking egg and cheese type of deal. There were no marks where the frying an had crisped up a bit of egg – all these ‘omelets’ were uniform in size, and without evidence of it having been anywhere near a pan. There was some kind of bread available for toasting – looked like eggy bread. I asked the black lady who laid out the breakfast what it was exactly, but she wasn’t even sure. She said somebody else made it and froze it, then posted it out to her. Nothing here was actually cooked on the premises – the same thing must have applied to the so-called eggs and bacon. All out of a packet and into the microwave. The thing is, the fucker wasn’t even warm, let alone hot. I had to get it microwaved again. Also, what really bugs me, apart from the fact they didn’t produce anything other than shit out of a bag, was that all the cutlery and plates were plastic and Styrofoam – the lazy bastards could not even be bothered to use proper utensils and wash up. No, just chuck it all in a binbag and bury it in the landfill. Just one ‘breakfast room’ in one hotel, in one town, in one state in America – just think of all the plastic everyday, getting binned off all over the country, just in the average motel/hotel, not to mention any other food outlet, like fuel stations, and takeaways. All because the bastards are too lazy to fill a dishwasher and press a button.
And the coffee. Fucking hell, the coffee. Now I’m quite partial to a good cup of coffee. In fact I love the stuff, and take great pride in the daily ritual of making my brew in the morning, using only the best Brazilian beans and all that nonsense. Well, here at this hotel, there were five different jugs containing coffee on display, but only one of them had a label saying it contained decaffeinated
I managed to find some ‘regular’ food the other day – a bag of crisps. ‘Classic’ potato chips. The ingredients read, potatoes, salt, sunflower/corn oil, no preservatives or additives, and that was it. About 4000 calories a bag, mind, but at least it was real food ingredients. As soon as you looked at a flavoured variety, the ingredient list became the now familiar long list of stuff I would normally associate with a chemistry lesson back in school.
Go to a diner, or a burger joint, or just about anywhere for that matter, and look at the ridiculous choice of different shit you can ingest. Down south, it’s stuff like fried chicken, chicken fried chicken, chicken fried steak, grits, biscuits with gravy. Yes, biscuits with gravy. Basically, it’s a dried up old scone with a dollop of congealed wallpaper paste dumped on it. Chicken fried chicken, we had assumed, was a chicken that had cooked another one of its own. A sort of cannabalism, whereas a chicken fried steak was a piece of cow, fried by a chicken. Impressive stuff. But the waitress in the Holly Springs diner put us straight. “we fry EVERYTHING down here in the south”.
Chicken fried chicken, apparently, is boneless chicken, as opposed to fried chicken, which is chicken with a bone in. Usually with some sort of ‘finger-lickin’ batter turdy stuff around it. Chicken fried steak, on the other hand, is a piece of beef fried (presumably without bones) and covered in battery turdy stuff again.
And of course, the chickens won’t be just chickens – they will be full of growth promoting hormones, added water, flavour enhancers and other shit.
So there you go. They fry everything – even Snickers bars, just like those Scotch twats. Down in the Mississippi Delta they appear to be obsessed with fried chicken. It’s just about all they eat. Apart from perhaps, the odd Corn Dog. That, I think, is a hot dog on a stick, covered in mushed up sweetcorn and battery turdy stuff, then deep fried.
Thursday, 30 September 2010
Snot-Gobblers and Scab-Munchers
Why are some people so disgusting?
Gobbing in the street in front of everybody else. Gargling up a gloop of phlegm to hoik out onto the pavement for all to see and hear. Happens all the time in London. And it’s usually the Arabs, or the Romanians. That’s not racist, it’s just fact.
The other day, I heard the sound of snot blowing out of a nose at speed. I looked round to see some bloke leaning forward, emptying each nostril in turn across the pavement. Great. Finger closing one side as he snorted it all out of the other, and vice-versa. In the middle of the shopping area, with no concern for public decency or manners. What a pity the wind didn’t catch it and flip the trail of snot down his clothes.
OK, I put my hands up now – I do enjoy the occasional fart in public. Usually only if it is done to embarrass the wife. I usually pump out a corker when we’re in town and then give her a clip across the back of the head and call her a ‘dirty bugger’. That’s just good clean harmless fun.
But snotting in public? What’s even worse, as I’ve witnessed on occasion, is snot-gobbling. Years ago, I remember seeing a mature professional in a suit, waiting at the traffic lights in his car, while digging out bogies. To my amazement, he was inspecting them and then popping them into his mouth. What kind of grown man eats mucas?
But just as bad, possibly even worse, was seeing a big bruiser of a bloke with a terrible flakey skin condition on his face (red and blotchy) – possibly a Pole, or other Eastern European – walking along towards me near Wembley Park tube, picking bits off his face and popping them into his mouth. For Fuck’s sake.
I’m writing this sitting in an airport restaurant in Houston, Texas, and across the table from me is a middle-aged businessman sitting with his laptop and a burger, letting out the occasional belch.
And I thought that kind of behaviour was reserved for Indian restaurant after a night on the piss. Standards are dropping – that’s for sure.
Bill Turnip
Gobbing in the street in front of everybody else. Gargling up a gloop of phlegm to hoik out onto the pavement for all to see and hear. Happens all the time in London. And it’s usually the Arabs, or the Romanians. That’s not racist, it’s just fact.
The other day, I heard the sound of snot blowing out of a nose at speed. I looked round to see some bloke leaning forward, emptying each nostril in turn across the pavement. Great. Finger closing one side as he snorted it all out of the other, and vice-versa. In the middle of the shopping area, with no concern for public decency or manners. What a pity the wind didn’t catch it and flip the trail of snot down his clothes.
OK, I put my hands up now – I do enjoy the occasional fart in public. Usually only if it is done to embarrass the wife. I usually pump out a corker when we’re in town and then give her a clip across the back of the head and call her a ‘dirty bugger’. That’s just good clean harmless fun.
But snotting in public? What’s even worse, as I’ve witnessed on occasion, is snot-gobbling. Years ago, I remember seeing a mature professional in a suit, waiting at the traffic lights in his car, while digging out bogies. To my amazement, he was inspecting them and then popping them into his mouth. What kind of grown man eats mucas?
But just as bad, possibly even worse, was seeing a big bruiser of a bloke with a terrible flakey skin condition on his face (red and blotchy) – possibly a Pole, or other Eastern European – walking along towards me near Wembley Park tube, picking bits off his face and popping them into his mouth. For Fuck’s sake.
I’m writing this sitting in an airport restaurant in Houston, Texas, and across the table from me is a middle-aged businessman sitting with his laptop and a burger, letting out the occasional belch.
And I thought that kind of behaviour was reserved for Indian restaurant after a night on the piss. Standards are dropping – that’s for sure.
Bill Turnip
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
PISS
Monday September 6, 2010
An overwhelming smell of stale piss engulfed the carriage of the train I was on, traveling into Waterloo from the cultural vacuum of Feltham, where they keep the young offenders. It was a doddery old man with a walking stick and a shock of wavy white hair and a beard to match. Getting on at Richmond, he stumbled past the vacant seats next to me, and after some deliberation, carefully lowered himself into a seat at the end of the carriage. Next to a woman.
His clothes were grubby and stained and he was generally disheveled. His eyes were beady. Slightly mad, and stary. Brilliant! He sat there, next to this poor woman, who was trapped all the way into Waterloo, with the pungent fumes of piss whipping straight up her nostrils. This was a serious personal freshness issue, and she was in the thick of it.
I could only see the top of her head from my seat (she probably had it buried in her jacket), but I could see the old man between the seats. He looked around him, staring intently, and probably having no teeth, his bearded chin came close to his nose. What a fantastic face. And what stories and life experiences lay behind those beady eyes?
I felt for that woman, I really did, and expected to see her make her excuses and ask him to let her out of the seat, but no, she suffered for a good twenty minutes, all the way to the terminal. I also felt sorry for him too, despite the fact that everyone in the carriage was wincing and twitching at the stink all around us. It’s easy to simply dismiss these people as disgusting piss-stinking old dossers, but who knows what he did in his life? He could have been fighting in the war (he looked like he might be old enough, possibly in his 80s), or he could have been a scientist or something impressive like that.
A pretty young teenage girl and her boyfriend were sitting opposite me, and I couldn’t help overhearing their conversation. She said, “you know that building, like, M I whatever it is?” “You know, MI5 or is it six, I don’t know, but it’s all green and that?”
“Well there’s like a load of flats next to it, and they look the same. Don’t you think that’s a bit worrying”
“How d’you mean?” asked the boyfriend.
“ Well, terrorists and that. You know it’s like the biggest target in London, and those flats look just like it, especially from the air. They might get confused and bomb the flats. I wouldn’t want to live there.”
Then, as we left Clapham Junction, “How does the train know which track to be on?” “There’s like loads of them”
“There is a driver” replied the boyfriend.
Right, and the driver decides which line to put the train on, of course.
Priceless.
So we pull into Waterloo and the old man rises from his seat to leave. As I approach along the aisle towards the door, the traumatised woman is sat there with a scarf wrapped around her face, covering her nostrils. She looks like she might throw up.
And, on the subject of piss, the other day I needed one as I was on the way to a job. In fact I’m always needing a piss these days – a combination of age, a weak bladder and strong coffee. The job was at a client’s office in Great Marlborough Street, and there are steps to an underground bog at the junction with Carnaby Street. Great, I thought, I’ll pop down here for a wazz before I go in, otherwise I’ll be dancing around all knock-kneed in front of the client, which won’t look good.
I walk down the steps and around the corner to the urinals to find four blokes standing there at the piss-pots. I immediately thought it strange to be so busy, but as they all looked round and stared at me, the realisation quickly dawned. Homos. Fucking hell. Still, I needed a piss and I was committed to it now. Thankfully there was a vanity screen between the pots for some privacy, so I had my piss, all the time knowing these fuckers were staring at me. Shaking the drops off in a hurry, I zipped up and turned to leave. One of these sleazeballs was at the other end with an enormous bone in his hand, stroking it and looking at me, while his chum next door watched him. Fucking perverts. Eleven in the morning in the West End for chrissakes. Have they no shame? Maybe that’s part of it – it must be – they get a kick out of being seen tugging each other.
I try not to be homophobic, but when people try to tell me it’s natural and normal and there's nothing wrong with it, I can’t help thinking that standing in a public bog-hole, strangling your own meat to an audience of other bandits and any poor innocent sod who happens to walk in for a slash, is far from fucking normal behaviour. As a hetrosexual, the thought of a quickie with a bird in a public place where you might get caught is kind of exciting, and to the extent that it is a hetrosexual encounter, by default, more natural and somehow more acceptable. This however, was downright ugly behaviour.
On the wall as I scurried up the steps back into the real world again, I noticed a council sign – asking the public to report drug abuse or inappropriate behaviour in the public bogs. So I rang the number and spoke to some bloke at Westminster council, or maybe it was Camden, I don’t know.
“There are at least two blokes down there, masturbating as we speak, and I thought you might like to know”, I said.
“Oh right, thanks for letting us know, we’ll come down and have a look.”
Fucking hell, half the council staff are going to rush down to Carnaby Street and pile down the stairs to get a look at a wanking session!
Bill Turnip
An overwhelming smell of stale piss engulfed the carriage of the train I was on, traveling into Waterloo from the cultural vacuum of Feltham, where they keep the young offenders. It was a doddery old man with a walking stick and a shock of wavy white hair and a beard to match. Getting on at Richmond, he stumbled past the vacant seats next to me, and after some deliberation, carefully lowered himself into a seat at the end of the carriage. Next to a woman.
His clothes were grubby and stained and he was generally disheveled. His eyes were beady. Slightly mad, and stary. Brilliant! He sat there, next to this poor woman, who was trapped all the way into Waterloo, with the pungent fumes of piss whipping straight up her nostrils. This was a serious personal freshness issue, and she was in the thick of it.
I could only see the top of her head from my seat (she probably had it buried in her jacket), but I could see the old man between the seats. He looked around him, staring intently, and probably having no teeth, his bearded chin came close to his nose. What a fantastic face. And what stories and life experiences lay behind those beady eyes?
I felt for that woman, I really did, and expected to see her make her excuses and ask him to let her out of the seat, but no, she suffered for a good twenty minutes, all the way to the terminal. I also felt sorry for him too, despite the fact that everyone in the carriage was wincing and twitching at the stink all around us. It’s easy to simply dismiss these people as disgusting piss-stinking old dossers, but who knows what he did in his life? He could have been fighting in the war (he looked like he might be old enough, possibly in his 80s), or he could have been a scientist or something impressive like that.
A pretty young teenage girl and her boyfriend were sitting opposite me, and I couldn’t help overhearing their conversation. She said, “you know that building, like, M I whatever it is?” “You know, MI5 or is it six, I don’t know, but it’s all green and that?”
“Well there’s like a load of flats next to it, and they look the same. Don’t you think that’s a bit worrying”
“How d’you mean?” asked the boyfriend.
“ Well, terrorists and that. You know it’s like the biggest target in London, and those flats look just like it, especially from the air. They might get confused and bomb the flats. I wouldn’t want to live there.”
Then, as we left Clapham Junction, “How does the train know which track to be on?” “There’s like loads of them”
“There is a driver” replied the boyfriend.
Right, and the driver decides which line to put the train on, of course.
Priceless.
So we pull into Waterloo and the old man rises from his seat to leave. As I approach along the aisle towards the door, the traumatised woman is sat there with a scarf wrapped around her face, covering her nostrils. She looks like she might throw up.
And, on the subject of piss, the other day I needed one as I was on the way to a job. In fact I’m always needing a piss these days – a combination of age, a weak bladder and strong coffee. The job was at a client’s office in Great Marlborough Street, and there are steps to an underground bog at the junction with Carnaby Street. Great, I thought, I’ll pop down here for a wazz before I go in, otherwise I’ll be dancing around all knock-kneed in front of the client, which won’t look good.
I walk down the steps and around the corner to the urinals to find four blokes standing there at the piss-pots. I immediately thought it strange to be so busy, but as they all looked round and stared at me, the realisation quickly dawned. Homos. Fucking hell. Still, I needed a piss and I was committed to it now. Thankfully there was a vanity screen between the pots for some privacy, so I had my piss, all the time knowing these fuckers were staring at me. Shaking the drops off in a hurry, I zipped up and turned to leave. One of these sleazeballs was at the other end with an enormous bone in his hand, stroking it and looking at me, while his chum next door watched him. Fucking perverts. Eleven in the morning in the West End for chrissakes. Have they no shame? Maybe that’s part of it – it must be – they get a kick out of being seen tugging each other.
I try not to be homophobic, but when people try to tell me it’s natural and normal and there's nothing wrong with it, I can’t help thinking that standing in a public bog-hole, strangling your own meat to an audience of other bandits and any poor innocent sod who happens to walk in for a slash, is far from fucking normal behaviour. As a hetrosexual, the thought of a quickie with a bird in a public place where you might get caught is kind of exciting, and to the extent that it is a hetrosexual encounter, by default, more natural and somehow more acceptable. This however, was downright ugly behaviour.
On the wall as I scurried up the steps back into the real world again, I noticed a council sign – asking the public to report drug abuse or inappropriate behaviour in the public bogs. So I rang the number and spoke to some bloke at Westminster council, or maybe it was Camden, I don’t know.
“There are at least two blokes down there, masturbating as we speak, and I thought you might like to know”, I said.
“Oh right, thanks for letting us know, we’ll come down and have a look.”
Fucking hell, half the council staff are going to rush down to Carnaby Street and pile down the stairs to get a look at a wanking session!
Bill Turnip
Thursday, 17 June 2010
A NICE RELAXING EVENING MEAL
June 16, 2010
I said I wanted a nice relaxed evening meal before catching the 6.29pm to London – none of this running around like a twat last minute fucking nonsense as usual.
I’d start the curry before 5pm and we’d eat around 5.30. Need to leave just before 6.15pm, as it takes around seven or eight minutes to drive to the station.
Well, as usual, I was late starting, but with the chicken balti underway and left it simmering while went off and fucked around some more on the computer. Suddenly, it’s 5.40pm and I haven’t even put the sodding rice on. Anyway, we sits down to eat at six o’clock.
Bolting my balti in the hope of having time for the ice cream and strawberries I had picked from the garden earlier, the wife sorts out the dessert while I whiz upstairs to get changed.
Fucking hell – it’s now 6.20 and the bastard train leaves in nine minutes! The journey takes seven or eight. So we jump in the car – me with a bowl of strawberries and ice cream in my hand. I’m trying to enjoy my nice relaxing meal while sitting in a car as the wife blats through the village, steaming round bends to get me there. I’m trying not to chuck chocolate ice cream all over my clean white shirt – or her leather upholstery. And then of course, the inevitable – we get stuck behind a fucking great tractor. Fuck shit fuck.
Legging it up over the platform bridge, I see the bastard train pulling out of the bastard station. Oh, what a fucking muppet. It’s an hour to wait for the next one, but the real problem is I have a ‘cheap bastard’ ticket that is only valid on the 6.29. so I’m faced with the prospect of having to buy another full price ticket, or hope they take pity on me.
The nice lady in the ticket office said she would ask the guard on the next train for me, but it depends on his mood. Well, I thought, I hope it’s a lighter mood than mine.
Fucking tosspot – if I’d only not pissed about thinking I had loads of time. But that’s the story of my whole bloody life.
Anyway, the guard on the 7.29pm was in a good mood, bought the story and let me on with my invalid cheap bastard ticket. I asked, “what happens when you change shift at Salisbury?”
He said he’d let the replacement guard know about me.
Well, we are standing at Salisbury now, as I write this shit in my little journal. I’ve just seen my friendly guard leave the train and walk away down the platform. I hope he did have a word with his colleague when they changed over. I took the precaution of making a note of his name – it always sounds more convincing if you can offer a name when trying to explain why you are traveling on a train without a valid ticket.
His name is Anthony Hancock. He is a very nice bloke.
So, I’m now wondering how the next guard is going to react when I tell him that Tony Hancock said it would be OK for me to travel.
I have a scene playing out in my head: “Yeah? Well I’m Arthur Askey, so get the fuck off my train.”
We’ll see what happens – just pulling away now. I’ll take a break and report back.
…….. a while later.
Well, no problem. The nice new lady guard knows all about me. She is trying to explain to two Brazilian women sitting across the aisle from me that they are on the wrong train. They have cheapo tickets also – for the next train. They got on too early at Salisbury.
I reassured her it wasn’t a conspiracy.
These Brazilian bints can’t speak a word of English and the guard is getting nowhere. Finally, she says to me she might as well let them travel, rather than boot them off at Grateley and leave them standing there for another hour on that desolate platform, wondering what the fuck they did wrong. So, I looked at them and said, “it’s OK”, gesturing with my hands to stay.
“Well, they understood that perfectly well” said the guard. of course they understood - I don’t think there is anyone in the world who does not understand the meaning of ‘OK’.
Turns out that apart from Potugese, one of them speaks French. My French is crap. But I get by on a few words still lodged in my mushy brain from my first year at school, some forty years ago. I really tried hard when I moved up to the ‘big school’ and actually enjoyed the subject. Partly because my old man had bought a Linguaphone ‘teach yourself French' record set.
I was keen to learn – like father, like son, I suppose. By the end of the first year the novelty began to wear off, and the 100% marks I was getting for the weekly dictation test began to wane. In no small part due to a newly forged friendship with someone who has become a life-long mate. We sat together in the second year, and that’s when my education got fucked up. We spent French lessons dropping a straightened out compass into a plasticine man lying on the wooden classroom floor.
I went from conscienscious swot to ‘must try harder’ fuck up in one term. Thanks Andy. Bad influence. What I had not realized was that after four years of fucking about in class, he, being the more intelligent one, was able to knuckle down and get through the O levels at the last minute. He had one ear cocked all the time, while we were both drawing cartoons in our jotters of blokes with ridiculously huge nobs, and caricatures of teachers and some of the weirder kids.
I failed French miserably. I didn’t even want to take it as a subject in the fourth year, but was told I had to. So much for being able to make choices like they said. I wanted to drop French and take Economics, but the cunts wouldn’t let me.
So anyway (I digress) the only French I have is what stuck in my head during that swotty first year at Grammar school. Kind of wish I had continued to learn – it would have come in useful, even enjoyable, on a few occasions over the years, to hold a conversation in another language.
The only other language I’m fluent in is bad language.
So there we have it. Tonight I got on a train I didn’t have a ticket for, and met two Brazilian grannies, also on a train they were not supposed to be on, and we had a nice chat (sort of) all the way from Salisbury to Waterloo.
It’s a funny old world. And I still got me strawberries and ice cream.
Yours
Bill Turnip
I said I wanted a nice relaxed evening meal before catching the 6.29pm to London – none of this running around like a twat last minute fucking nonsense as usual.
I’d start the curry before 5pm and we’d eat around 5.30. Need to leave just before 6.15pm, as it takes around seven or eight minutes to drive to the station.
Well, as usual, I was late starting, but with the chicken balti underway and left it simmering while went off and fucked around some more on the computer. Suddenly, it’s 5.40pm and I haven’t even put the sodding rice on. Anyway, we sits down to eat at six o’clock.
Bolting my balti in the hope of having time for the ice cream and strawberries I had picked from the garden earlier, the wife sorts out the dessert while I whiz upstairs to get changed.
Fucking hell – it’s now 6.20 and the bastard train leaves in nine minutes! The journey takes seven or eight. So we jump in the car – me with a bowl of strawberries and ice cream in my hand. I’m trying to enjoy my nice relaxing meal while sitting in a car as the wife blats through the village, steaming round bends to get me there. I’m trying not to chuck chocolate ice cream all over my clean white shirt – or her leather upholstery. And then of course, the inevitable – we get stuck behind a fucking great tractor. Fuck shit fuck.
Legging it up over the platform bridge, I see the bastard train pulling out of the bastard station. Oh, what a fucking muppet. It’s an hour to wait for the next one, but the real problem is I have a ‘cheap bastard’ ticket that is only valid on the 6.29. so I’m faced with the prospect of having to buy another full price ticket, or hope they take pity on me.
The nice lady in the ticket office said she would ask the guard on the next train for me, but it depends on his mood. Well, I thought, I hope it’s a lighter mood than mine.
Fucking tosspot – if I’d only not pissed about thinking I had loads of time. But that’s the story of my whole bloody life.
Anyway, the guard on the 7.29pm was in a good mood, bought the story and let me on with my invalid cheap bastard ticket. I asked, “what happens when you change shift at Salisbury?”
He said he’d let the replacement guard know about me.
Well, we are standing at Salisbury now, as I write this shit in my little journal. I’ve just seen my friendly guard leave the train and walk away down the platform. I hope he did have a word with his colleague when they changed over. I took the precaution of making a note of his name – it always sounds more convincing if you can offer a name when trying to explain why you are traveling on a train without a valid ticket.
His name is Anthony Hancock. He is a very nice bloke.
So, I’m now wondering how the next guard is going to react when I tell him that Tony Hancock said it would be OK for me to travel.
I have a scene playing out in my head: “Yeah? Well I’m Arthur Askey, so get the fuck off my train.”
We’ll see what happens – just pulling away now. I’ll take a break and report back.
…….. a while later.
Well, no problem. The nice new lady guard knows all about me. She is trying to explain to two Brazilian women sitting across the aisle from me that they are on the wrong train. They have cheapo tickets also – for the next train. They got on too early at Salisbury.
I reassured her it wasn’t a conspiracy.
These Brazilian bints can’t speak a word of English and the guard is getting nowhere. Finally, she says to me she might as well let them travel, rather than boot them off at Grateley and leave them standing there for another hour on that desolate platform, wondering what the fuck they did wrong. So, I looked at them and said, “it’s OK”, gesturing with my hands to stay.
“Well, they understood that perfectly well” said the guard. of course they understood - I don’t think there is anyone in the world who does not understand the meaning of ‘OK’.
Turns out that apart from Potugese, one of them speaks French. My French is crap. But I get by on a few words still lodged in my mushy brain from my first year at school, some forty years ago. I really tried hard when I moved up to the ‘big school’ and actually enjoyed the subject. Partly because my old man had bought a Linguaphone ‘teach yourself French' record set.
I was keen to learn – like father, like son, I suppose. By the end of the first year the novelty began to wear off, and the 100% marks I was getting for the weekly dictation test began to wane. In no small part due to a newly forged friendship with someone who has become a life-long mate. We sat together in the second year, and that’s when my education got fucked up. We spent French lessons dropping a straightened out compass into a plasticine man lying on the wooden classroom floor.
I went from conscienscious swot to ‘must try harder’ fuck up in one term. Thanks Andy. Bad influence. What I had not realized was that after four years of fucking about in class, he, being the more intelligent one, was able to knuckle down and get through the O levels at the last minute. He had one ear cocked all the time, while we were both drawing cartoons in our jotters of blokes with ridiculously huge nobs, and caricatures of teachers and some of the weirder kids.
I failed French miserably. I didn’t even want to take it as a subject in the fourth year, but was told I had to. So much for being able to make choices like they said. I wanted to drop French and take Economics, but the cunts wouldn’t let me.
So anyway (I digress) the only French I have is what stuck in my head during that swotty first year at Grammar school. Kind of wish I had continued to learn – it would have come in useful, even enjoyable, on a few occasions over the years, to hold a conversation in another language.
The only other language I’m fluent in is bad language.
So there we have it. Tonight I got on a train I didn’t have a ticket for, and met two Brazilian grannies, also on a train they were not supposed to be on, and we had a nice chat (sort of) all the way from Salisbury to Waterloo.
It’s a funny old world. And I still got me strawberries and ice cream.
Yours
Bill Turnip
Friday, 26 March 2010
DOOR TO DOOR NUMPTYS
DOOR TO DOOR NUMPTYS?
Yes – numpties actually. As in the bloke who knocked on our door today, with a white transit outside, and a story about his company having exhibited their garden furniture recently at a local fair, and how they were selling it off cheap rather than take it all the way back to Essex with them. Really good deal and all that shite. Yeah, right mate.
It was a nursery company, but I can’t remember the name of it, because all I could look at on this bloke’s company logo, emblazoned on his jacket was the word ‘Nurserys’. Was it supposed to read Nursery, or Nurseries? Had some idiot put an ‘S’ on the end, or was it some even bigger idiot with no grasp whatsoever of the grammatical concept of plurals?
Or maybe, yes maybe, it was a statement meaning the jacket belonged to the nursery, but they forgot to add the apostrophe, and it should have read Nursery’s.
Not only would I not buy from a bloke in a white van knocking on my door, but I certainly wouldn’t buy from a company that proudly displays its own disregard for, or lack of understanding of, English grammar, by making its employees walk around wearing such a bold embroidered statement on their left tit for all to see.
For some reason, I am reminded of a time when I was getting an overpriced dried up manky sandwich in Tesco Metro in Lower Regent Street. An announcement over the tannoy: “Can Winston come to de customah service decks please, Winston to de customah service decks”
I made up the Winston bit because I didn’t take in the name, only the word that was supposed to represent ‘desk’. I hung around a bit in the hope of hearing it again, because it was so funny, and sure enough, about one minute later this dude calls for Winston to come to the customer service decks. Brilliant. Someone must have wanted to arkse him a question abah’ sump fink.
What a cock.
Yours,
Bill Turnip
Yes – numpties actually. As in the bloke who knocked on our door today, with a white transit outside, and a story about his company having exhibited their garden furniture recently at a local fair, and how they were selling it off cheap rather than take it all the way back to Essex with them. Really good deal and all that shite. Yeah, right mate.
It was a nursery company, but I can’t remember the name of it, because all I could look at on this bloke’s company logo, emblazoned on his jacket was the word ‘Nurserys’. Was it supposed to read Nursery, or Nurseries? Had some idiot put an ‘S’ on the end, or was it some even bigger idiot with no grasp whatsoever of the grammatical concept of plurals?
Or maybe, yes maybe, it was a statement meaning the jacket belonged to the nursery, but they forgot to add the apostrophe, and it should have read Nursery’s.
Not only would I not buy from a bloke in a white van knocking on my door, but I certainly wouldn’t buy from a company that proudly displays its own disregard for, or lack of understanding of, English grammar, by making its employees walk around wearing such a bold embroidered statement on their left tit for all to see.
For some reason, I am reminded of a time when I was getting an overpriced dried up manky sandwich in Tesco Metro in Lower Regent Street. An announcement over the tannoy: “Can Winston come to de customah service decks please, Winston to de customah service decks”
I made up the Winston bit because I didn’t take in the name, only the word that was supposed to represent ‘desk’. I hung around a bit in the hope of hearing it again, because it was so funny, and sure enough, about one minute later this dude calls for Winston to come to the customer service decks. Brilliant. Someone must have wanted to arkse him a question abah’ sump fink.
What a cock.
Yours,
Bill Turnip
ONLY LOSERS TAKE THE BUS
The title of a song by The Fatima Mansions, back in 1989. A great song title which I took pleasure in quoting when a mate suggested it might be easier for me to go somewhere in London by bus. I said, "Fuck off - only losers take the bus."
Of course, those words have come back to bite me in the ass during these lean times. I am a loser, for sure, possibly a born loser, and I do indeed now take the bus. And I feel no shame. Well, maybe once in a while when some young city prick passes the bus stop where I’m standing, driving his open top Porsche, girlfriend next to him with her head buried in his lap. I get the odd twinge of envy when I see that.
Anyway, the point of this rant is not about my descent from middle class professional to bumbling scumbag no-hoper. It’s about the public at large using the transport designed for them – public transport.
So, you can’t afford to run a car? Well, let’s say you need to travel from Taunton up to London early one morning, say on a Monday, and you want to come back late afternoon, say on the Friday. Fuck me, it’s going to cost you the best part of 200 squid !! I kid you not. You could probably do that in a taxi and get picked up and dropped off at the door, AND get a hand with your bags. And if there’s two of you traveling, then that option has to be worth taking. Bugger me – 200 nicker!!
Thing is, Gordon Bastard-Brown and his jock cronies are hammering us motorists right left and centre – tax this, pollution charge that, congestion charge this and remote fines from some fucking camera on a pole that snaps a pic of you stopping on a single yellow to check the map – all in a bid to make us use our cars less and reduce our carbon footprint by taking the train or the bus. Yeah yeah yeah. All very noble and all that. But what about the cost?
Go to Belgium or Germany, or some other European country and see if you have to pay the kind of money we in the UK do in order to ride a bastard train for a couple of hours. No way you’d have to pay 200 squid and on a Friday afternoon and have to stand all the fucking way to Taunton.
Even in the US (Murricka as we like to call it down this way) where many people have never seen a train, let alone ridden on one (some in Alabama might not even know what one looks like either) I traveled about 120 miles out of New York down to Asbury Park in New Jersey for 20 dollars. Return. OK, it was a shit train and it took nearly three hours, but you get my drift?
On the bus – it is actually half reasonable in London at £1.20 per ride with th old Oyster card. Until that is you need to take four different buses to get where you are going, then it’s a different matter altogether. But down my way, it costs about two quid to go a mile and a half into town, and then another two to come back to the village. I call that fucking pricey. Especially when I could go right across London on the No 11 for £1.20.
But what really gets me going is stuff like the sign I saw on a bus I passed (in my car I might add) when passing through Hungerford a couple of weeks back:
‘Exact fare only – no change given’
Fucking bastards or what?
What about the poor sod who only has a twenty, late at night, waiting for the last bus home, because he was out of cash and went to the hole in the wall to get some bunce but couldn’t change it up because everywhere was closed. What are they going to do? Kick him off I suppose. And it’s not like the driver won’t have any change, because all the other losers have been scurrying round making sure they have the right money before they dare get on. No change given. What kind of utter bollocks is that? Is it because the driver is too bone idle to hand it over? Or are they too thick to work out change in Hungerford? Perhaps it’s a money-making scam – the fare is £1.50.
“oh, I’ve only got two one pound coins”
“Tough titties, madam. That’s an extra 50p in my pocket then”
Otherwise you can fucking walk it you pee-smelling old buzzard.
Do that several times on a shift and I’ll bet they can rack up a few extra quid on top of their wages.
Can you imagine being turned away from the last bus out of Hungerford on a foul night in January with the rain coming at you sideways, while some smug bastard behind the wheel shrugs his shoulders and shuts the doors in your face.
Maybe it was something like that what got Michael Ryan so pissed off back in 1987.
Public transport? Do me a favour. Shite.
Bill Turnip
Of course, those words have come back to bite me in the ass during these lean times. I am a loser, for sure, possibly a born loser, and I do indeed now take the bus. And I feel no shame. Well, maybe once in a while when some young city prick passes the bus stop where I’m standing, driving his open top Porsche, girlfriend next to him with her head buried in his lap. I get the odd twinge of envy when I see that.
Anyway, the point of this rant is not about my descent from middle class professional to bumbling scumbag no-hoper. It’s about the public at large using the transport designed for them – public transport.
So, you can’t afford to run a car? Well, let’s say you need to travel from Taunton up to London early one morning, say on a Monday, and you want to come back late afternoon, say on the Friday. Fuck me, it’s going to cost you the best part of 200 squid !! I kid you not. You could probably do that in a taxi and get picked up and dropped off at the door, AND get a hand with your bags. And if there’s two of you traveling, then that option has to be worth taking. Bugger me – 200 nicker!!
Thing is, Gordon Bastard-Brown and his jock cronies are hammering us motorists right left and centre – tax this, pollution charge that, congestion charge this and remote fines from some fucking camera on a pole that snaps a pic of you stopping on a single yellow to check the map – all in a bid to make us use our cars less and reduce our carbon footprint by taking the train or the bus. Yeah yeah yeah. All very noble and all that. But what about the cost?
Go to Belgium or Germany, or some other European country and see if you have to pay the kind of money we in the UK do in order to ride a bastard train for a couple of hours. No way you’d have to pay 200 squid and on a Friday afternoon and have to stand all the fucking way to Taunton.
Even in the US (Murricka as we like to call it down this way) where many people have never seen a train, let alone ridden on one (some in Alabama might not even know what one looks like either) I traveled about 120 miles out of New York down to Asbury Park in New Jersey for 20 dollars. Return. OK, it was a shit train and it took nearly three hours, but you get my drift?
On the bus – it is actually half reasonable in London at £1.20 per ride with th old Oyster card. Until that is you need to take four different buses to get where you are going, then it’s a different matter altogether. But down my way, it costs about two quid to go a mile and a half into town, and then another two to come back to the village. I call that fucking pricey. Especially when I could go right across London on the No 11 for £1.20.
But what really gets me going is stuff like the sign I saw on a bus I passed (in my car I might add) when passing through Hungerford a couple of weeks back:
‘Exact fare only – no change given’
Fucking bastards or what?
What about the poor sod who only has a twenty, late at night, waiting for the last bus home, because he was out of cash and went to the hole in the wall to get some bunce but couldn’t change it up because everywhere was closed. What are they going to do? Kick him off I suppose. And it’s not like the driver won’t have any change, because all the other losers have been scurrying round making sure they have the right money before they dare get on. No change given. What kind of utter bollocks is that? Is it because the driver is too bone idle to hand it over? Or are they too thick to work out change in Hungerford? Perhaps it’s a money-making scam – the fare is £1.50.
“oh, I’ve only got two one pound coins”
“Tough titties, madam. That’s an extra 50p in my pocket then”
Otherwise you can fucking walk it you pee-smelling old buzzard.
Do that several times on a shift and I’ll bet they can rack up a few extra quid on top of their wages.
Can you imagine being turned away from the last bus out of Hungerford on a foul night in January with the rain coming at you sideways, while some smug bastard behind the wheel shrugs his shoulders and shuts the doors in your face.
Maybe it was something like that what got Michael Ryan so pissed off back in 1987.
Public transport? Do me a favour. Shite.
Bill Turnip
Thursday, 28 January 2010
popcorn morons
And they wonder why going to the pictures is in decline.
I use the word 'pictures' intentionally, by the way. Too many people these days call it the 'movies'. Fucking Americanisms creeping into our language all the time. It's the 'pictures' or the 'flicks', OK?
Went to see 'The Road' last night. Wednesdays is the only day we go now, because we can do that Orange Wednesday thing and get a BOGOF. Just as well it's two for one, because the prices seem to have jumped up recently. £7.40 for a ticket - I'm sure it was £6.30 last time I went. That's at least a 15% increase in one hit. Whatever happened to keeping in line with inflation, or simply keeping it affordably attractive during an economic downturn?
Fuckers.
Anyone who has seen The Road will know that it is a pretty sombre affair - not exactly an uplifting film, but one that is probably fairly true to what life might be like in a post-apocalyptic world where nothing works any more and there are no animals or vegetation. Food is scarce and cannibalism is rife. Pretty serious stuff, and a film with an overall effect that requires the viewer to listen to the sparse dialogue carefully and take in all the nuances and atmosphere of the film.
So it beats me why so many twats feel the need to talk all the way through it. What he fuck are they doing in the cinema watching this? Or not watching as it would seem - the glow of mobile phones lighting up little corners of the auditorium constantly. The constant rustle of fucking popcorn in stereo, to the left, right, in front and behind - quadrophonic surround sound irritating popcorn shovelling and sweet wrapper noises, along with people getting up, leaving for a piss or more fucking popcorn, bunches of yoofs at the back mumbling and giggling.
Why don't they go and watch something more appropriate and less cerebrally challenging for them, like Alvin and the Chipmunks or Astro Boy? I reckon they wanted to see Avatar, which was full up, so they plumped for this instead. Bastards.
And it's not just the kids. Two old biddies sat behind us in the back row, giving a running commentary. The opening shots of the film were flowers and garden vegetation. The old woman asks, in her broad Somerset accent, "Where's this s'posed to be to? Is it 'Murricah? Reckon it might be Florida, looking at they flowers". And later, during a scene where a family meets up with the survivor kid, "Oh, they've got a dog, too, look."
I can't deal with all this shit. All I want to do is sit down in comfort and watch and listen. I don't want to talk to anybody and i certainly don't want to listen to all that shit. Noisy food should be banned from cinemas. Noisy people should be kicked out and banned for life. Why don't they just wait till it comes out on dvd and then they can fuck it up for everybody in their own homes and leave the rest of us to enjoy the cinema experience uninterrupted.
Fat chance of that ever happening. Ignorant bastards.
Bill Turnip
I use the word 'pictures' intentionally, by the way. Too many people these days call it the 'movies'. Fucking Americanisms creeping into our language all the time. It's the 'pictures' or the 'flicks', OK?
Went to see 'The Road' last night. Wednesdays is the only day we go now, because we can do that Orange Wednesday thing and get a BOGOF. Just as well it's two for one, because the prices seem to have jumped up recently. £7.40 for a ticket - I'm sure it was £6.30 last time I went. That's at least a 15% increase in one hit. Whatever happened to keeping in line with inflation, or simply keeping it affordably attractive during an economic downturn?
Fuckers.
Anyone who has seen The Road will know that it is a pretty sombre affair - not exactly an uplifting film, but one that is probably fairly true to what life might be like in a post-apocalyptic world where nothing works any more and there are no animals or vegetation. Food is scarce and cannibalism is rife. Pretty serious stuff, and a film with an overall effect that requires the viewer to listen to the sparse dialogue carefully and take in all the nuances and atmosphere of the film.
So it beats me why so many twats feel the need to talk all the way through it. What he fuck are they doing in the cinema watching this? Or not watching as it would seem - the glow of mobile phones lighting up little corners of the auditorium constantly. The constant rustle of fucking popcorn in stereo, to the left, right, in front and behind - quadrophonic surround sound irritating popcorn shovelling and sweet wrapper noises, along with people getting up, leaving for a piss or more fucking popcorn, bunches of yoofs at the back mumbling and giggling.
Why don't they go and watch something more appropriate and less cerebrally challenging for them, like Alvin and the Chipmunks or Astro Boy? I reckon they wanted to see Avatar, which was full up, so they plumped for this instead. Bastards.
And it's not just the kids. Two old biddies sat behind us in the back row, giving a running commentary. The opening shots of the film were flowers and garden vegetation. The old woman asks, in her broad Somerset accent, "Where's this s'posed to be to? Is it 'Murricah? Reckon it might be Florida, looking at they flowers". And later, during a scene where a family meets up with the survivor kid, "Oh, they've got a dog, too, look."
I can't deal with all this shit. All I want to do is sit down in comfort and watch and listen. I don't want to talk to anybody and i certainly don't want to listen to all that shit. Noisy food should be banned from cinemas. Noisy people should be kicked out and banned for life. Why don't they just wait till it comes out on dvd and then they can fuck it up for everybody in their own homes and leave the rest of us to enjoy the cinema experience uninterrupted.
Fat chance of that ever happening. Ignorant bastards.
Bill Turnip
Monday, 25 January 2010
BOG
Why the buggery bollocks should us men have to remember to put the toilet seat down after a piss?
Why can't women remember to leave it UP for us?
And while they're at it, give it a wipe round, because despite the fact they are sitting on it, they still manage to drench the seat with piss. They must have sprinkler attachments.
Bill Turnip
Why can't women remember to leave it UP for us?
And while they're at it, give it a wipe round, because despite the fact they are sitting on it, they still manage to drench the seat with piss. They must have sprinkler attachments.
Bill Turnip
SNOW
It’s good to have a bit of snow in winter. Restores my faith in the seasons. With all this global warming shit, I worry that a mild winter means a crap summer, with everything being fucked up – pissing with rain all through August, hot as hell in March, and T-shirt weather in December. It’s supposed to be cold in winter and a bit of snow confirms that.
Trouble is, it makes a bollocks of everything. Can’t get to work, can’t get the kids to school – they are all shut. Everyone becomes stupid. We all know that after a couple of days or so, the main roads at least, will be usable, and the real problems are confined to the housing estates and country lanes. So what is it with people who go to the supermarket and empty the place of bread and milk?
I nipped into Morrisons to pick up a couple of pints as we were getting low, and there wasn’t a single fucking drop of the stuff – not even skimmed milk, or that fake soya stuff whatever it is. I didn’t bother looking for the UHT shite. Then I went over to the bread aisle. Not one solitary fucking bun, let alone a bag of crappy white sliced shit.
Morons! I hope they got home with all this stuff and found they had no room in the freezer and it all went mouldy. You’d think it was the end of the world. Panic buyers – what a load of twats.
Doesn’t bother me. I had a tin of milk powder in the cupboard anyway, plus I have a bread machine, which I much prefer over the bought stuff anyway – it’s cheaper and tastes better and doesn’t contain all that preservative and shit they put in the factory stuff.
A mate of mine was talking to me about bread machines. Said he used his once, but the bread went stale after a couple of days. I said, “Yeah, and?” He said he preferred the shop stuff because it was less faff and it stayed fresh for a week. I pointed out that bread was supposed to go stale and should be eaten fresh. The only reason shop bread doesn’t go stale quickly, is because it is full of preservative chemicals, anti-oxidants and all kinds of shit that doesn’t come under the heading of ‘food’.
Anyway, empty supermarkets was a good reason to start eating some of the crap that has been clogging up the freezer for months. You know, the stuff you keep pulling out and looking at, then thinking, ‘fuck it’ and shoving it back in there for another day when you’re more desperate, or inspired to do something clever with it, like make a special sauce and roast some exotic vegetables or some such fancy Ramsay-esque time-wasting nonsense.
Didn’t go sledging this time, and I didn’t even take a single picture of the white stuff. Bit ashamed of myself really. My kid went sledging with her mates, so that was fine, but I used my still buggered up knee as an excuse not to bother.
What irritated me about the snow, apart from slipping up on my fat arse as I left the London digs to go to work, was all the idiot drivers, stuck in the queue of traffic going nowhere over the fresh snowfall on top of the packed down stuff from the previous week. So many of them had not bothered to wipe the snow off their cars, and were driving with no vision out of the rear and side windows. They relied on the front windscreen wipers to give them a view out of the car, but those with no rear wipers, hadn’t even taken the trouble to brush it off before leaving their drive. Partial forward vision only.
What is wrong with these assholes?
Lazy bastards with no common sense, afraid of getting their pinkies cold. Twats, all of them.
Bill Turnip
Trouble is, it makes a bollocks of everything. Can’t get to work, can’t get the kids to school – they are all shut. Everyone becomes stupid. We all know that after a couple of days or so, the main roads at least, will be usable, and the real problems are confined to the housing estates and country lanes. So what is it with people who go to the supermarket and empty the place of bread and milk?
I nipped into Morrisons to pick up a couple of pints as we were getting low, and there wasn’t a single fucking drop of the stuff – not even skimmed milk, or that fake soya stuff whatever it is. I didn’t bother looking for the UHT shite. Then I went over to the bread aisle. Not one solitary fucking bun, let alone a bag of crappy white sliced shit.
Morons! I hope they got home with all this stuff and found they had no room in the freezer and it all went mouldy. You’d think it was the end of the world. Panic buyers – what a load of twats.
Doesn’t bother me. I had a tin of milk powder in the cupboard anyway, plus I have a bread machine, which I much prefer over the bought stuff anyway – it’s cheaper and tastes better and doesn’t contain all that preservative and shit they put in the factory stuff.
A mate of mine was talking to me about bread machines. Said he used his once, but the bread went stale after a couple of days. I said, “Yeah, and?” He said he preferred the shop stuff because it was less faff and it stayed fresh for a week. I pointed out that bread was supposed to go stale and should be eaten fresh. The only reason shop bread doesn’t go stale quickly, is because it is full of preservative chemicals, anti-oxidants and all kinds of shit that doesn’t come under the heading of ‘food’.
Anyway, empty supermarkets was a good reason to start eating some of the crap that has been clogging up the freezer for months. You know, the stuff you keep pulling out and looking at, then thinking, ‘fuck it’ and shoving it back in there for another day when you’re more desperate, or inspired to do something clever with it, like make a special sauce and roast some exotic vegetables or some such fancy Ramsay-esque time-wasting nonsense.
Didn’t go sledging this time, and I didn’t even take a single picture of the white stuff. Bit ashamed of myself really. My kid went sledging with her mates, so that was fine, but I used my still buggered up knee as an excuse not to bother.
What irritated me about the snow, apart from slipping up on my fat arse as I left the London digs to go to work, was all the idiot drivers, stuck in the queue of traffic going nowhere over the fresh snowfall on top of the packed down stuff from the previous week. So many of them had not bothered to wipe the snow off their cars, and were driving with no vision out of the rear and side windows. They relied on the front windscreen wipers to give them a view out of the car, but those with no rear wipers, hadn’t even taken the trouble to brush it off before leaving their drive. Partial forward vision only.
What is wrong with these assholes?
Lazy bastards with no common sense, afraid of getting their pinkies cold. Twats, all of them.
Bill Turnip
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
FALLING APART AT THE SEAMS
Getting old - bag of shite.
It really is.
In my head I can do the stuff I did in my 20’s without thinking about it. In reality I can’t. Such as trying to run like fuck to stop a traffic warden from putting a ticket on my car a hundred yards up the hill. Fucked a ligament in my knee, didn’t I?
And it wasn’t even a sprint – it was a laboured lumbering lurch in his general direction. Arrived at my car wincing in pain and panting and pleading with this fucker in a hat with the brim pulled down onto his nose. I got there before he started writing the ticket, saving myself 60 quid. So the pain and disability over the past three weeks has been worth it.
Had I sprained my knee AND got a ticket – that would have really ruined my day. I was fifteen minutes over, so I was taking the piss. But for once I got away with it.
So for most of November I’ve been limping around like an old biddy. Can’t help thinking my earlier rant about mobility chairs has come round and bitten me in the ass.
I’ve been holding commuters up in the rush hour on station steps, as I negotiate them one at a time like some frail old soul. It’s fucking pathetic. If anyone on the tube offers me their seat and going to deck them.
It’s a bastard, growing old.
I’ve always been ugly, but age has now given me the dubious privilege of being bald fat AND ugly.
I’ve now got more hair growing out of my ass than I have on my head.
It used to be that when I woke up in the morning, I’d be very stiff – in the toilet area. These days, when I get up, pretty much everything else is stiff apart from the nob.
I have to come up for air when tying my boots up. Which is why I’ve taken to slip-ons.
Once, when I wasn’t even old – around 1995 in my late 30’s – I went to see The Verve play at Camden Town Hall (this was their first incarnation, before they split up and then got back together with all that ballady shit). I was at the bar getting a pint of some shitty fizz, and the girl asked if I was an A&R scout or something. I said no, why? She said, “because you’re older than everyone else here – I thought you might be a record company bloke.”
I promptly told her to fuck off.
Why do kids think older people have never done anything? They walk around wearing Led Zeppelin T-shirts thinking they are the shit, and not realising that us old fuckers were there when it happened, and had the original T-shirt, but it rotted with sweat and ended up being used to wipe oil off the Cortina’s dipstick. Just because I can’t get into my two-tone 32 inch bell bottom loon pants anymore, doesn’t mean I can’t dig rock and roll. I listen to lots of new shit. I love some of the stuff I listened to as a kid in the 70s, but I’m always up for something that’s happening now. I hope to be the old fucker at the gig that everyone looks at because he’s about 60 years older than anyone else there. I’m going to dive into the mosh pit with my Zimmer.
Fuck ‘em.
Yours, Bill Turnip
It really is.
In my head I can do the stuff I did in my 20’s without thinking about it. In reality I can’t. Such as trying to run like fuck to stop a traffic warden from putting a ticket on my car a hundred yards up the hill. Fucked a ligament in my knee, didn’t I?
And it wasn’t even a sprint – it was a laboured lumbering lurch in his general direction. Arrived at my car wincing in pain and panting and pleading with this fucker in a hat with the brim pulled down onto his nose. I got there before he started writing the ticket, saving myself 60 quid. So the pain and disability over the past three weeks has been worth it.
Had I sprained my knee AND got a ticket – that would have really ruined my day. I was fifteen minutes over, so I was taking the piss. But for once I got away with it.
So for most of November I’ve been limping around like an old biddy. Can’t help thinking my earlier rant about mobility chairs has come round and bitten me in the ass.
I’ve been holding commuters up in the rush hour on station steps, as I negotiate them one at a time like some frail old soul. It’s fucking pathetic. If anyone on the tube offers me their seat and going to deck them.
It’s a bastard, growing old.
I’ve always been ugly, but age has now given me the dubious privilege of being bald fat AND ugly.
I’ve now got more hair growing out of my ass than I have on my head.
It used to be that when I woke up in the morning, I’d be very stiff – in the toilet area. These days, when I get up, pretty much everything else is stiff apart from the nob.
I have to come up for air when tying my boots up. Which is why I’ve taken to slip-ons.
Once, when I wasn’t even old – around 1995 in my late 30’s – I went to see The Verve play at Camden Town Hall (this was their first incarnation, before they split up and then got back together with all that ballady shit). I was at the bar getting a pint of some shitty fizz, and the girl asked if I was an A&R scout or something. I said no, why? She said, “because you’re older than everyone else here – I thought you might be a record company bloke.”
I promptly told her to fuck off.
Why do kids think older people have never done anything? They walk around wearing Led Zeppelin T-shirts thinking they are the shit, and not realising that us old fuckers were there when it happened, and had the original T-shirt, but it rotted with sweat and ended up being used to wipe oil off the Cortina’s dipstick. Just because I can’t get into my two-tone 32 inch bell bottom loon pants anymore, doesn’t mean I can’t dig rock and roll. I listen to lots of new shit. I love some of the stuff I listened to as a kid in the 70s, but I’m always up for something that’s happening now. I hope to be the old fucker at the gig that everyone looks at because he’s about 60 years older than anyone else there. I’m going to dive into the mosh pit with my Zimmer.
Fuck ‘em.
Yours, Bill Turnip
Saturday, 26 September 2009
SPEAK ENGLISH DO YA??
Why is it so fucking difficult sometimes, to understand your own language when it is, (allegedly), spoken to you by some people in this country….innit?
An announcement on a tube train. Totally illegible.
“Mine de gap” - I’m OK with that – it has a resonance that you can pick up in most foreign accents. It’s anything else that stumps me. When it’s Zebidee the Jamaican pot-smoking tea-cosy-wearing boneless floppy dude dribbling into the Tannoy, I don’t stand a fucking chance.
Even the cockneys are hard work. Landan andahgraind? Fuck off mate.
The other day around the tube system in London:
Three Somali-looking schoolgirls on the tube – jabbering at high speed. I simply could not tell if they were speaking English.
Announcement on the same train – total gibberish.. Jive talk? Swahili? Who knows. Not one word understood.
Twenty feet away, some oriental bint jabbering on her mobile loudly for the whole carriage to hear. Again, couldn't tell you if it was English or Mandarin.
What crock of shit.
Yours
Bill Turnip
An announcement on a tube train. Totally illegible.
“Mine de gap” - I’m OK with that – it has a resonance that you can pick up in most foreign accents. It’s anything else that stumps me. When it’s Zebidee the Jamaican pot-smoking tea-cosy-wearing boneless floppy dude dribbling into the Tannoy, I don’t stand a fucking chance.
Even the cockneys are hard work. Landan andahgraind? Fuck off mate.
The other day around the tube system in London:
Three Somali-looking schoolgirls on the tube – jabbering at high speed. I simply could not tell if they were speaking English.
Announcement on the same train – total gibberish.. Jive talk? Swahili? Who knows. Not one word understood.
Twenty feet away, some oriental bint jabbering on her mobile loudly for the whole carriage to hear. Again, couldn't tell you if it was English or Mandarin.
What crock of shit.
Yours
Bill Turnip
Sunday, 30 August 2009
EASYSHITE
Budget airlines? Fuck off!
They’re all robbing bastards. Fly for ten quid they say. Yeah, right. It doesn’t matter where or when you plan to go, those ten quid fares just don’t seem to exist. Maybe 40 quid. Then you add all the taxes and shit, and before you know it you’re up to £70 or more. And then you realize it’s each way.
Let’s get this into perspective first, before I start ranting proper. If you can fly to some Eastern European shithole for less than a train ride from Waterloo to some UK shithole like Yeovil, then I guess it represents good value. It’s the little catches and the bullshit that gets to me. Putting aside the relatively cheap fares, when you go on any of the budget airline websites you are bombarded with all kinds of crap designed to take more money off you. Want to add Speedy Boarding? Why would I? Be the first through the doors of the departure lounge to ensure you get the seat you want. You have got to be fucking stupid to fall for that one. Everyone knows that once you get through the doors and down the ramp, you get on a bleedin’ bus. Yeah, let’s all cough up another twelve quid or whatever so we can be first on the bus that goes out to the apron and dumps you next to the plane.
That’s where the real fun starts. Having paid your money to be first on the bus, you find that although you chose to stand next to the door at the front thinking you’d be first off, the bus sweeps round in a big arc around the plane and you find that actually, you are now at the back of the bus and on the wrong side to get out – you are the last one out of the doors, and you’ve just had your pants pulled down for twelve quid and every other bastard is fighting each other up the stairs into the plane. Sucker. You are left sitting next to the huge sweaty lard-ass from Bletchley
Got a question for Easyshite? Most questions can be answered via the website, but if you don’t find what you are looking for, you can use the ‘contact us’ form on the home page. Oh really? Try finding it. I scanned the home page over and over and I’m buggered if I could find any way of sending these bastards an email. It’s almost impossible to find a phone number, and when you do it’s a non-geographical 0870 number. So, having paid for my 01/02 anytime calls bundle, I still have to pay another 10p per minute to listen to some bint telling me to check the website and then another bint telling me they are doing their best to answer my call at this busy time, while the company racks up a couple more quid out of me, in between subjecting me to some dreadful muzak down the phone.
I have a number for easyshite head office that is geographical, but when you ring it the fucking old bag on reception will not put you through to customer services – she says you have to ring a different number. Why is that? So they can make a couple of extra quid out of you, that’s why. Just imagine all the poor bastards trying to get in touch by phone, on hold for several minutes at 10p per minute. Let’s just say ten calls every minute, for an average of ten minutes. That’s £10.00 per minute, £600.00 per hour, and £7200.00 for a 12 hour day at the call centre. A good chunk of that call revenue will go to the airline. I don’t know if that is a conservative estimate or just a wild guess that’s way off the mark, because although it seems busy because you are on hold for a while, they quite possibly could be putting you on hold to make more money and you’re in the queuing system for no reason. Think about it.
Talking of phone rip-offs, do yourself a favour, and next time you go to ring an 0845 or whatever type number, go and take a look at the website: www.saynoto0870.com where you can search for alternative landline numbers. It’s a database of alternative numbers put together by people who are pissed off with having to pay for the call when they’ve already paid for it through their phone provider. Good on ‘em I say. The website even won an award. Gives you some idea how people view these money-grabbing call centres.
Anyway, back to easyshite. I booked flights way back in March to take the missus and the sprog to Poland for a wedding a few weeks back in August this year. £222.00 or thereabouts for the three of us return. Not bad at £74.00 each. We booked in for one bag only in the hold, because they charge almost as much as the bloody fare for a passenger. See, that’s where they get you – if you can’t go hand baggage you’re fucked. £16 per bag each way and if you take more than 20kg Gawd help you. You will need a bank loan to cover the excess baggage fee. So we paid for one bag between us which we thought should be enough with the hand baggage as well. Of course, trying to sort out clobber for the trip, the fucking wife was bleating that we couldn’t do it in one bag – ‘why didn’t you put two on?’ Because I don’t want those robbing shits to take any more cash off me. Besides, she agreed to it. Except that she swears blind she didn’t and I just went ahead and made the decision all by myself. Fact is she was sat next to me confirming everything with me before I hit the ‘book now’ button.
Another wind up: the hand baggage can weigh as much as you can lift into the cabin bins, but it has to be no bigger than 55x40x20cm. Guess what? I’ve got the perfect travel bag, that’s a backpack with a ‘mini-me’ secondary detachable backpack on the front, and wheels and a handle for when you don’t want to carry it on your back. Trouble is, although the bag is just within the size limits, the fucking wheels take it a few cm over to 60cm. And you know what would happen had I turned up with it and got asked to put it in the little measuring frame? Yes, that’s right, they would have made me put it in the hold and that costs even more when done at the airport. What a fucking wind-up. It’s an ideal travel bag, but no way was I going to risk it.
So, we booked in March to fly to in August. Come May we get an email from those c**ts to say they’ve cancelled our flight. No reason, no apology, just to let us know we are no longer flying to Warsaw on Aug 6 and perhaps we’d like to go back onto the website and re-book another flight, for no extra charge. No extra charge? Fuck me, do they think they are doing me a favour??
I tried to book the flight on a different day, but every time I got ‘no seats available’. In the end I phoned up customer services, listened to the old bint, heard some shite music, and asked the real live bint (after several minutes of crap) what the fuck was going on. “oh, we’ve cancelled that route’ Why? “no longer viable – they put the landing fees up, so we cancelled the route.” What about your obligation to the passengers that have already paid for their flights well in advance, and whose money you’ve trousered and earned a bit of interest on? Seems they don’t give a flying fuck about the customer. So that’s why I couldn’t re-book it. It doesn’t exist anymore. Well thanks a bunch.
So finally, after a lot of fucking about, we flew from Bristol to Krakow instead and had to suffer another four hours of traveling by train to Warsaw, at extra cost, with numb arses riding in a cattle truck, and kids jeering on the side of the track, waving and making slit throat gestures as we passed through the Auschwitz region.
The last time I went to Krakow I went with easyshite, only to find I could have gone with BA for a fiver less. That hurt knowing that after I had committed to going with the other shower. Didn’t work out this time, but what a shitter, eh?
Still, it was a great wedding – I’m glad I packed me dinking boots.
Fuck ‘em all.
Bill Turnip
They’re all robbing bastards. Fly for ten quid they say. Yeah, right. It doesn’t matter where or when you plan to go, those ten quid fares just don’t seem to exist. Maybe 40 quid. Then you add all the taxes and shit, and before you know it you’re up to £70 or more. And then you realize it’s each way.
Let’s get this into perspective first, before I start ranting proper. If you can fly to some Eastern European shithole for less than a train ride from Waterloo to some UK shithole like Yeovil, then I guess it represents good value. It’s the little catches and the bullshit that gets to me. Putting aside the relatively cheap fares, when you go on any of the budget airline websites you are bombarded with all kinds of crap designed to take more money off you. Want to add Speedy Boarding? Why would I? Be the first through the doors of the departure lounge to ensure you get the seat you want. You have got to be fucking stupid to fall for that one. Everyone knows that once you get through the doors and down the ramp, you get on a bleedin’ bus. Yeah, let’s all cough up another twelve quid or whatever so we can be first on the bus that goes out to the apron and dumps you next to the plane.
That’s where the real fun starts. Having paid your money to be first on the bus, you find that although you chose to stand next to the door at the front thinking you’d be first off, the bus sweeps round in a big arc around the plane and you find that actually, you are now at the back of the bus and on the wrong side to get out – you are the last one out of the doors, and you’ve just had your pants pulled down for twelve quid and every other bastard is fighting each other up the stairs into the plane. Sucker. You are left sitting next to the huge sweaty lard-ass from Bletchley
Got a question for Easyshite? Most questions can be answered via the website, but if you don’t find what you are looking for, you can use the ‘contact us’ form on the home page. Oh really? Try finding it. I scanned the home page over and over and I’m buggered if I could find any way of sending these bastards an email. It’s almost impossible to find a phone number, and when you do it’s a non-geographical 0870 number. So, having paid for my 01/02 anytime calls bundle, I still have to pay another 10p per minute to listen to some bint telling me to check the website and then another bint telling me they are doing their best to answer my call at this busy time, while the company racks up a couple more quid out of me, in between subjecting me to some dreadful muzak down the phone.
I have a number for easyshite head office that is geographical, but when you ring it the fucking old bag on reception will not put you through to customer services – she says you have to ring a different number. Why is that? So they can make a couple of extra quid out of you, that’s why. Just imagine all the poor bastards trying to get in touch by phone, on hold for several minutes at 10p per minute. Let’s just say ten calls every minute, for an average of ten minutes. That’s £10.00 per minute, £600.00 per hour, and £7200.00 for a 12 hour day at the call centre. A good chunk of that call revenue will go to the airline. I don’t know if that is a conservative estimate or just a wild guess that’s way off the mark, because although it seems busy because you are on hold for a while, they quite possibly could be putting you on hold to make more money and you’re in the queuing system for no reason. Think about it.
Talking of phone rip-offs, do yourself a favour, and next time you go to ring an 0845 or whatever type number, go and take a look at the website: www.saynoto0870.com where you can search for alternative landline numbers. It’s a database of alternative numbers put together by people who are pissed off with having to pay for the call when they’ve already paid for it through their phone provider. Good on ‘em I say. The website even won an award. Gives you some idea how people view these money-grabbing call centres.
Anyway, back to easyshite. I booked flights way back in March to take the missus and the sprog to Poland for a wedding a few weeks back in August this year. £222.00 or thereabouts for the three of us return. Not bad at £74.00 each. We booked in for one bag only in the hold, because they charge almost as much as the bloody fare for a passenger. See, that’s where they get you – if you can’t go hand baggage you’re fucked. £16 per bag each way and if you take more than 20kg Gawd help you. You will need a bank loan to cover the excess baggage fee. So we paid for one bag between us which we thought should be enough with the hand baggage as well. Of course, trying to sort out clobber for the trip, the fucking wife was bleating that we couldn’t do it in one bag – ‘why didn’t you put two on?’ Because I don’t want those robbing shits to take any more cash off me. Besides, she agreed to it. Except that she swears blind she didn’t and I just went ahead and made the decision all by myself. Fact is she was sat next to me confirming everything with me before I hit the ‘book now’ button.
Another wind up: the hand baggage can weigh as much as you can lift into the cabin bins, but it has to be no bigger than 55x40x20cm. Guess what? I’ve got the perfect travel bag, that’s a backpack with a ‘mini-me’ secondary detachable backpack on the front, and wheels and a handle for when you don’t want to carry it on your back. Trouble is, although the bag is just within the size limits, the fucking wheels take it a few cm over to 60cm. And you know what would happen had I turned up with it and got asked to put it in the little measuring frame? Yes, that’s right, they would have made me put it in the hold and that costs even more when done at the airport. What a fucking wind-up. It’s an ideal travel bag, but no way was I going to risk it.
So, we booked in March to fly to in August. Come May we get an email from those c**ts to say they’ve cancelled our flight. No reason, no apology, just to let us know we are no longer flying to Warsaw on Aug 6 and perhaps we’d like to go back onto the website and re-book another flight, for no extra charge. No extra charge? Fuck me, do they think they are doing me a favour??
I tried to book the flight on a different day, but every time I got ‘no seats available’. In the end I phoned up customer services, listened to the old bint, heard some shite music, and asked the real live bint (after several minutes of crap) what the fuck was going on. “oh, we’ve cancelled that route’ Why? “no longer viable – they put the landing fees up, so we cancelled the route.” What about your obligation to the passengers that have already paid for their flights well in advance, and whose money you’ve trousered and earned a bit of interest on? Seems they don’t give a flying fuck about the customer. So that’s why I couldn’t re-book it. It doesn’t exist anymore. Well thanks a bunch.
So finally, after a lot of fucking about, we flew from Bristol to Krakow instead and had to suffer another four hours of traveling by train to Warsaw, at extra cost, with numb arses riding in a cattle truck, and kids jeering on the side of the track, waving and making slit throat gestures as we passed through the Auschwitz region.
The last time I went to Krakow I went with easyshite, only to find I could have gone with BA for a fiver less. That hurt knowing that after I had committed to going with the other shower. Didn’t work out this time, but what a shitter, eh?
Still, it was a great wedding – I’m glad I packed me dinking boots.
Fuck ‘em all.
Bill Turnip
Saturday, 1 August 2009
DRESS UP WARM - IT'S GOING TO BE A SCORCHER
OK, so it’s been a shit Summer so far, and so much for the long hot Summer they said we’d have. Fact is I don’t like it too hot – makes me sweat when I’m working, and then I worry that I might end up stinking like a bastard.
Back in June we had bit of a hot spell when it got quite warm enough thank you very much, up in the mid-20’s and above, I think. T-shirt weather, that’s for sure.
So why is it that when it’s getting sticky out there and the sun is starting to melt your head, you see all these twats walking around in Winter clothes??
No kidding, I’m in the City of London, sitting on a bench in Finsbury Circus waiting to meet a colleague and some nob walks by wearing a suit covered by a dirty great Crombie overcoat.
I pass a girl in the street, she‘s also wearing a coat, buttoned up to the neck, collar up. On another occasion, probably the following day, sitting outside having a coffee with an old mate in Wealdstone (fucking dump) there’s a girl waiting for a bus, sitting on a bench across the road. She’s wearing one of those shiny puffy anorak-bomber jacket things with a furry hood – done up, with the hood up for chrissakes!
Topping the lot was this: around the same time in June when it was pretty damn warm, down Neasden way, a middle aged Asian bloke, walking along the road in a jumper and, wait for this: a balaclava!
Fucking unbelievable.
What is wrong with these people?
Could they be the very same assholes I see walking around in a February blizzard wearing nothing more than a T-shirt?
Girls out on the town on a Saturday night in January - with a windchill factor to shrivel your gonads in a matter of minutes - tottering around the bars in high heels and strapless mini-dresses. Basically, one flimsy layer of gossamer between them and frostbite. You know they are really freezing their tits off - literally - when you see those little protrusions out front, looking like cocktail sausages wedged under the dress. Great!
Yours,
Bill Turnip
Back in June we had bit of a hot spell when it got quite warm enough thank you very much, up in the mid-20’s and above, I think. T-shirt weather, that’s for sure.
So why is it that when it’s getting sticky out there and the sun is starting to melt your head, you see all these twats walking around in Winter clothes??
No kidding, I’m in the City of London, sitting on a bench in Finsbury Circus waiting to meet a colleague and some nob walks by wearing a suit covered by a dirty great Crombie overcoat.
I pass a girl in the street, she‘s also wearing a coat, buttoned up to the neck, collar up. On another occasion, probably the following day, sitting outside having a coffee with an old mate in Wealdstone (fucking dump) there’s a girl waiting for a bus, sitting on a bench across the road. She’s wearing one of those shiny puffy anorak-bomber jacket things with a furry hood – done up, with the hood up for chrissakes!
Topping the lot was this: around the same time in June when it was pretty damn warm, down Neasden way, a middle aged Asian bloke, walking along the road in a jumper and, wait for this: a balaclava!
Fucking unbelievable.
What is wrong with these people?
Could they be the very same assholes I see walking around in a February blizzard wearing nothing more than a T-shirt?
Girls out on the town on a Saturday night in January - with a windchill factor to shrivel your gonads in a matter of minutes - tottering around the bars in high heels and strapless mini-dresses. Basically, one flimsy layer of gossamer between them and frostbite. You know they are really freezing their tits off - literally - when you see those little protrusions out front, looking like cocktail sausages wedged under the dress. Great!
Yours,
Bill Turnip
Wednesday, 27 May 2009
MEMORY OF A GOLDFISH
Oh fuck. I’ve forgotten what I was going to rant about.
Yeah, that’s it. Memory. Fucking useless mine is. I go upstairs to get something, the wife asks me a question on the way up, and by the time I get to the top I’ve forgotten whatever it was I climbed the stairs for. It’s bollocks.
I have to go back down and stand in the place where I thought of getting whatever it was originally (if I can remember where I was) and think hard. Suddenly it comes back to me and off I go. Half way up the stairs I’ve forgotten again.
The other day, the wife dropped me at the station to catch the train to London. Made it in good time. Gave her a sloppy kiss and made my way over the stairs to the platform. Just about to climb aboard when I realised I’d left my wallet at home with all my cards and Oyster card, Network card etc. Buggery bollocks. I had £2.40 in my pocket, so I couldn’t even buy a single tube ticket the other end. Rang the missus and she made a dash back home to get the wallet. She was never going to make it before the train left. The guard looked at me wondering if I was getting on. I told him why I couldn’t, but also explained that I had a dirt cheap ticket that only allowed travel on that particular train and I would have to buy another full price ticket. He asked for the document and scribbled something down on his bit of paper, tore it off and told me to show it to the guard on the next train. He’d requested that I be allowed to travel on the following train, even though the ticket was not valid. Brilliant – thanks mate, and to South West trains, I take back all the shit I threw at you during a recent rant here.
Anyway, wife came back with wallet after the train had left, but all was well, even though it was a balls-ache.
Where was I?
Memory. Useless. Thought it was linked to age, but thinking about it, I have always been crap at remembering anything, from an early age. My Mum would always ask as I left the house for school, if I had my hanky. I never did. Why would anyone blow all that sticky snot into a cloth and then put it in their pocket? That’s disgusting. All that phlegm oozing around in your trousers. And when you need to pull it out again, you have to find a bit of the hanky that isn’t squelching or crusty. My mates would never let that go, always asking if I had my hanky, the bastards. And then, as a teenager, on my way out to a gig, it would be, “Have you got your tickets?”. Invariably, I’d have to turn around and go back inside to get them. More laughter from my mates.
Then, later in my teens and early twenties, my favourite trick was to leave stuff on the roof of my car and drive off. Mother would sometimes send me off to work with a plate of salad wrapped in cling-film. Usually, a slice or two of ham with some limp lettuce, branston pickle and beetroot – oh happy days. Spoilt rotten, I was. One day I put in on the roof of the car while I loaded my other stuff in and then drove off oblivious to the fact that lunch was sitting directly above my head. It was only when I had to brake suddenly for some asshole who stepped out onto a pedestrian crossing in front of me, that I noticed. My plate of ham and lettuce and beetroot etc launched itself into the air as a food projectile, skimming over my bonnet and smashing right in front of this bloke, who got splashed with beetroot up his legs.
Another time in the mid seventies, I left the office in a hurry with a Rolleiflex camera on the roof of the car. As I lurched out of the yard I noticed something in the mirror bouncing across the road. Surprisingly, it still worked and I went off to the job and used the equipment – no problem.
After driving from Brixham to Paignton once, again in the mid seventies, I was waiting at the traffic lights, when a bloke started waving at me from the pavement. I wound the window down and he told me there was a box on my car roof. Sure enough, it’s my camera gear again. But this time it stayed on, despite my speed, as it was in a leather camera box and my car roof was a soft-top: I had a Triumph Spitfire at the time, so the weight of the box and the fabric of the roof stopped it from moving too far.
What a fucking numpty. But not because I was driving a Spitfire, even though it was apparently a hairdresser’s car. The car was OK, but I just looked like a twat in my Brutus shirt with Spaniel ear collars and thirty-inch flares, with a brain like a sieve. A dough-bake, or a daft Apeth, as my old Nan would say.
Now I’ve forgotten what the fuck it was I am supposed to be doing today…..
Yeah, that’s it. Memory. Fucking useless mine is. I go upstairs to get something, the wife asks me a question on the way up, and by the time I get to the top I’ve forgotten whatever it was I climbed the stairs for. It’s bollocks.
I have to go back down and stand in the place where I thought of getting whatever it was originally (if I can remember where I was) and think hard. Suddenly it comes back to me and off I go. Half way up the stairs I’ve forgotten again.
The other day, the wife dropped me at the station to catch the train to London. Made it in good time. Gave her a sloppy kiss and made my way over the stairs to the platform. Just about to climb aboard when I realised I’d left my wallet at home with all my cards and Oyster card, Network card etc. Buggery bollocks. I had £2.40 in my pocket, so I couldn’t even buy a single tube ticket the other end. Rang the missus and she made a dash back home to get the wallet. She was never going to make it before the train left. The guard looked at me wondering if I was getting on. I told him why I couldn’t, but also explained that I had a dirt cheap ticket that only allowed travel on that particular train and I would have to buy another full price ticket. He asked for the document and scribbled something down on his bit of paper, tore it off and told me to show it to the guard on the next train. He’d requested that I be allowed to travel on the following train, even though the ticket was not valid. Brilliant – thanks mate, and to South West trains, I take back all the shit I threw at you during a recent rant here.
Anyway, wife came back with wallet after the train had left, but all was well, even though it was a balls-ache.
Where was I?
Memory. Useless. Thought it was linked to age, but thinking about it, I have always been crap at remembering anything, from an early age. My Mum would always ask as I left the house for school, if I had my hanky. I never did. Why would anyone blow all that sticky snot into a cloth and then put it in their pocket? That’s disgusting. All that phlegm oozing around in your trousers. And when you need to pull it out again, you have to find a bit of the hanky that isn’t squelching or crusty. My mates would never let that go, always asking if I had my hanky, the bastards. And then, as a teenager, on my way out to a gig, it would be, “Have you got your tickets?”. Invariably, I’d have to turn around and go back inside to get them. More laughter from my mates.
Then, later in my teens and early twenties, my favourite trick was to leave stuff on the roof of my car and drive off. Mother would sometimes send me off to work with a plate of salad wrapped in cling-film. Usually, a slice or two of ham with some limp lettuce, branston pickle and beetroot – oh happy days. Spoilt rotten, I was. One day I put in on the roof of the car while I loaded my other stuff in and then drove off oblivious to the fact that lunch was sitting directly above my head. It was only when I had to brake suddenly for some asshole who stepped out onto a pedestrian crossing in front of me, that I noticed. My plate of ham and lettuce and beetroot etc launched itself into the air as a food projectile, skimming over my bonnet and smashing right in front of this bloke, who got splashed with beetroot up his legs.
Another time in the mid seventies, I left the office in a hurry with a Rolleiflex camera on the roof of the car. As I lurched out of the yard I noticed something in the mirror bouncing across the road. Surprisingly, it still worked and I went off to the job and used the equipment – no problem.
After driving from Brixham to Paignton once, again in the mid seventies, I was waiting at the traffic lights, when a bloke started waving at me from the pavement. I wound the window down and he told me there was a box on my car roof. Sure enough, it’s my camera gear again. But this time it stayed on, despite my speed, as it was in a leather camera box and my car roof was a soft-top: I had a Triumph Spitfire at the time, so the weight of the box and the fabric of the roof stopped it from moving too far.
What a fucking numpty. But not because I was driving a Spitfire, even though it was apparently a hairdresser’s car. The car was OK, but I just looked like a twat in my Brutus shirt with Spaniel ear collars and thirty-inch flares, with a brain like a sieve. A dough-bake, or a daft Apeth, as my old Nan would say.
Now I’ve forgotten what the fuck it was I am supposed to be doing today…..
Sunday, 17 May 2009
SLIPPERY WHEN WET
‘Customers should take extra care during wet weather, as platforms and the station concourse can become slippery’
Every few minutes I’m hearing this, while waiting for a tube at Wembley. For fuck’s sake. Now, maybe I’m just old and cynical, but these announcements wouldn’t by any chance be anything to do with covering themselves against compensation claims, now would they?
A bit of ass-covering going on, perhaps? Someone slips up on their arse and tries to sue. But, ‘Your honour, we put out warnings over the Tannoy every 52 seconds during rainy weather’.
Irritates the crap out of me that does.
Of course, if the dozy twats had not laid shiny smooth marble-type floor tiles, but chosen something with a stippled surface, they wouldn't have a problem with punters falling on their arses in the first place. What kind of moron lays a completely smooth glossy floor in a public area that is subject to wet shoes tramping all over it?
I’m in Asda, and they have a conveyor belt that takes you up to the first floor so you can fill your trolley with cheap clothing made by kids in far east sweatshops. As soon as you, or anyone, sets foot on it, the recorded announcement starts up: “WARNING, moving ramp – please take care. For your comfort and safety, please make sure you hold the handrail while in motion’, or some such silly shit.
For my comfort? How is holding on to a handrail while moving at two miles per hour going to make me comfortable? Honestly!
And this message is repeated all the way up this poxy ramp and every time a person steps onto it. If I worked in that shop, anywhere near the ramp to the clothing department, I’m sure I would lose my mind completely. I’d just go berserk after a week of hearing that hundreds of times a day. It’s no wonder the staff all look like fucking zombies.
Add to that, the most awful dreadful wailing pop muzak by Eurovision failures that is piped through the ceiling, and you have a recipe for disaster. Someone will snap one day, and come to work with an automatic weapon and shoot the place up.
Ladies and Gentlemen, for your safety, cctv is in use throughout London Underground. For my safety? Give me a break. They’re just spying on us mate. Fucking cameras everywhere. Until you get your own out of course. “sorry sir, you aren’t allowed to take pictures here.” Why not? ‘security’ OH FUCK OFF!!
In a place, that’s open to the public, where hundreds of cameras are recording our movements, do we really not have the right to take our own pictures? I haven’t given permission for these c*nts to film me, so why should I need their permission to use my own camera? Fuck ‘em.
Can someone tell me what law I’d be breaking? No, of course not – there isn’t one.
London mayor (who actually is quite likeable after Ken) is planning to ban photography on the tube network. You have to pay for a permit. Well, Boris, you can tightly roll up your poxy permit and cram it right up your sphincter.
Bastards
Yours
Bill Turnip
Every few minutes I’m hearing this, while waiting for a tube at Wembley. For fuck’s sake. Now, maybe I’m just old and cynical, but these announcements wouldn’t by any chance be anything to do with covering themselves against compensation claims, now would they?
A bit of ass-covering going on, perhaps? Someone slips up on their arse and tries to sue. But, ‘Your honour, we put out warnings over the Tannoy every 52 seconds during rainy weather’.
Irritates the crap out of me that does.
Of course, if the dozy twats had not laid shiny smooth marble-type floor tiles, but chosen something with a stippled surface, they wouldn't have a problem with punters falling on their arses in the first place. What kind of moron lays a completely smooth glossy floor in a public area that is subject to wet shoes tramping all over it?
I’m in Asda, and they have a conveyor belt that takes you up to the first floor so you can fill your trolley with cheap clothing made by kids in far east sweatshops. As soon as you, or anyone, sets foot on it, the recorded announcement starts up: “WARNING, moving ramp – please take care. For your comfort and safety, please make sure you hold the handrail while in motion’, or some such silly shit.
For my comfort? How is holding on to a handrail while moving at two miles per hour going to make me comfortable? Honestly!
And this message is repeated all the way up this poxy ramp and every time a person steps onto it. If I worked in that shop, anywhere near the ramp to the clothing department, I’m sure I would lose my mind completely. I’d just go berserk after a week of hearing that hundreds of times a day. It’s no wonder the staff all look like fucking zombies.
Add to that, the most awful dreadful wailing pop muzak by Eurovision failures that is piped through the ceiling, and you have a recipe for disaster. Someone will snap one day, and come to work with an automatic weapon and shoot the place up.
Ladies and Gentlemen, for your safety, cctv is in use throughout London Underground. For my safety? Give me a break. They’re just spying on us mate. Fucking cameras everywhere. Until you get your own out of course. “sorry sir, you aren’t allowed to take pictures here.” Why not? ‘security’ OH FUCK OFF!!
In a place, that’s open to the public, where hundreds of cameras are recording our movements, do we really not have the right to take our own pictures? I haven’t given permission for these c*nts to film me, so why should I need their permission to use my own camera? Fuck ‘em.
Can someone tell me what law I’d be breaking? No, of course not – there isn’t one.
London mayor (who actually is quite likeable after Ken) is planning to ban photography on the tube network. You have to pay for a permit. Well, Boris, you can tightly roll up your poxy permit and cram it right up your sphincter.
Bastards
Yours
Bill Turnip
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
DONALD'S MUCK
Next to the supermarket down here in Chickentown, there is a McDonalds. (I'm always astonished by the number of people that consider the place as somewhere to go for their Sunday lunch). Every time I go into the supermarket car park I look over at the far flung corners of the car park, where all the cap-wearing peanut-headed white tracksuit wearing scrawny little scrotes hang out in their shiny Vauxhall Novas comparing alloys.
You can see where they've been parked, sitting in their motors and talking shit to each other out of their windows. Because the ground is covered in all that food packaging crap and styrofoam cartons and brown paper bags. Litterbugging lazy shitbag little fucks, all of them.
You know, what does it take to walk over to a bin a few yards away and chuck your shit in that?
If I was the manager of McFuckingDonalds, and I knew who these twats were, the next time they came in to buy BigTurd and fries, I would empty it all onto the counter with no packaging whatsoever. No wrappers, no bags, no nothing - just hand it over loose. "Here you go, nobs, just put it all in the pockets of your baggy-assed jeans, squirt a bit of ketchup and some salt down there and it will all mix up nicely by the time you get back to the motor. Just remember to take the burger out of your ass-pocket before you get in it."
That way, these bastards would be less likely to dirty the place up with all that shit.
Bill Turnip
You can see where they've been parked, sitting in their motors and talking shit to each other out of their windows. Because the ground is covered in all that food packaging crap and styrofoam cartons and brown paper bags. Litterbugging lazy shitbag little fucks, all of them.
You know, what does it take to walk over to a bin a few yards away and chuck your shit in that?
If I was the manager of McFuckingDonalds, and I knew who these twats were, the next time they came in to buy BigTurd and fries, I would empty it all onto the counter with no packaging whatsoever. No wrappers, no bags, no nothing - just hand it over loose. "Here you go, nobs, just put it all in the pockets of your baggy-assed jeans, squirt a bit of ketchup and some salt down there and it will all mix up nicely by the time you get back to the motor. Just remember to take the burger out of your ass-pocket before you get in it."
That way, these bastards would be less likely to dirty the place up with all that shit.
Bill Turnip
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