Leggings

 

 

 

THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS? . . . HO! HO! HO!

Lately, I’ve found myself wondering, what if. . . .What if, archaeologists one day discover the remains of a fourth Wiseman who didn’t quite make it to Bethlehem? What if, perhaps having consumed too much wine and then having found himself separated from the other three (who went on to become famous), he followed the wrong star east and the donkey on which he was riding, stumbled over a cliff?

Or what if, global recession forces Santa to close his factories at the north pole and shift production to China adding thousands of unemployed Elf migrants to our already over-stretched social housing lists and having to claim benefits. Mr Rumplestiltskin, with his ability to weave straw into gold would no doubt be inundated with job offers in today’s economic climate, but who would employ an Elf that can only build toys?

Unsure whether I can enjoy Christmas anymore, these are the genre of ‘…and finally…’ news reports I would rather listen to, than the more familiar ‘how many more shopping days left’ news reports we will soon start hearing on our radios and televisions.

Because, as usual, even before I've even consumed a mince pie or strung a silver bauble from my tree, the January sales will have already started with TV commercials seducing the masses into parting from their cash faster than a pick-pocket extracts cash from a victim in London’s Oxford Street.

During the next few weeks we will give liberty to consumption and greed as consumerism reaches new levels of depravity and children write ‘must have’ wish lists totalling more than I paid for my first car, despatching them no doubt by email or text message.

Is it any wonder then, that our inordinate appetite to satiate Christmas expectations leave so many of us in debt and utterly miserable. Children, become slaves to trepidation at the thought of saving enough pocket money in order to buy pleasing gifts while grown-ups implement creative accounting strategies to stockpile enough food and beer to sustain an average family for six months in a nuclear bunker.

What if then, if we could teach ourselves and our children to understand a little more about some of the traditions surrounding this midwinter festival, and less about consumerism, we may all then learn to be content in the absence of procurement and be thankful for what we already have.

The magic of Christmas that I grew up with has long since past. The traditional twelve days of Christmas, in better days - a duration of modest celebration, has been replaced by a chip and pin extravaganza while seasons greetings are now delivered to me by text message leaving my mantelpiece bare. (Note: If you can’t be bothered or just don’t like buying cards, then try picking up the phone and speaking)

We may well muse that when Pope Julius Ist declared in the fourth century that Christ's official birthday would be held on the 25th of December, he didn't envisaged the festivities being whitewashed by commerce with such wrath, sixteen hundred years later.

I remember my joy as a child one Christmas morning unwrapping a magic set, a Slinky and a chocolate selection box. Nowadays, failed lazy broods stomp their feet and demand overpriced brain deprivation technology of any nature, just so long as it plugs into the back of a television set.

Never shall I spawn a child so repellent, preferring to tutor healthy activities far removed from the mire of a plasma screen.

I admire other world cultures and their ability to embrace contentment through modest expectation, unlike this wretched country where people are judged according to what gadgetry they possess and where contentment is a commodity to be purchased.

What if then, Santa, whose iconic image is more prevailing than Che Guevara’s and symbolic of modern consumerism and greed, is killed off in an arranged freak accident? Christmas could then be re-invented in a traditional vein with children in their formative years including my own, being raised on minimum expectations and with the ability to be content in the absence of overpriced, brain dumbing and pointless consumer goods . . . have a good Christmas!

LUCKY STRIKE

Quite some time ago I was shown being interviewed on Sky News because I’d just made a bet with high street bookmaker William Hill claiming that I would be struck by lightning before I ever won the lottery. They accepted my bet and if this ever happens and I survive, I’ll collect ten grand.

Yet despite recent heavy thunder storms I never even came close. However, I recon if I was to come back in my next life as a cow, it would be a completely different ball game. I'll wager that if you select any cow at random from any field then the odds are it could tell you a story, or knew a cow that could, about a cow friend or a relative from a different herd, that was killed by lightning.

Any dairy farmer will tell you the same thing that it would not be considered strange or unusual in any way, if, following a heavy thunderstorm, a head-count revealed a cow deficit. With almost constant life-long exposure to the elements, overall body mass surface area and their not so clever concept of safety in numbers by everyone bunching together under the same tree, it only requires a single bolt of lightning to wipe out any number of cows in a single strike, leaving the farmer presumably to just write them off as spoiled goods like a shop-keeper might do if he came across a packet of broken biscuits during an audit.

No chance then of my bet being accepted had I been a cow and presumably I suppose I’d be wasting my time shopping around for a long term life cover plan with benefits. Because even if I did tick all the right boxes to most of the questions put to me by the insurance underwriter – when it got to the one where he said ‘when grazing, where would you usually go to seek refuge and shelter during an unexpected thunderstorm? If I replied ‘under a tree’, I think he’ll just make his excuses and leave.

Further questions would inevitably raise issues pertaining to the high methane content that cows are known to produce with implications directly related to an incident reported last year in the UK when a coach full of foreign tourists supposedly witnessed a cow suddenly burst into flames and explode.

I hope that any of you who read this, won't misinterpret my ramblings and presume that I have some kind of twisted issue with cows, because in actual fact I empathise and have a great fondness with cows believing them to be underrated and misunderstood.

I just can’t help it when every time the meteorological office issue a warning forecasting heavy rain and thunder, there's always  a tiny-weeny bit of me that wishes I could become a cow just for a few hours, because I genuinely believe it would improve my chance of being struck with a bolt of lightning and winning the ten thousand pounds. The only bit that scares is not being able to change back into me again and remaining as a cow for the rest of my life.

Collecting my winnings and enjoying the money of course, is wholly dependent on whether or not I become one of the two thousand or so people who are killed globally by lightning each year. This necessitates my coming into contact with lightning for an astonishingly and inconceivable brief duration, just short enough for me to sustain no more than superficial burns with standard blistering and scattered areas of melted body hair - but not long enough that the soles on my shoes start smoking.

It’s estimated that the Earth’s surface is struck by lightning around 100 times a second or over 8 million times each day, so the actual real odds of anyone of us getting struck is around 1 in 600,000. Compare this to the absurd odds of winning the lottery jackpot at 1 in 14,000,000 and you can maybe understand my reasoning but also understand quite clearly why William Hill limited my bet to no more than £10 at 1000 to 1. It took William Hill a several days to consider the mathematical probabilities before getting back to me and accepting my proposal.

This subject does naturally pop up during conversation now and again creating some interest and the response is always usually the same starting with perhaps disbelief and then amusement, generally then followed by a few wise cracks or silly remarks with implications that I’m probably some kind of crank. But more commonly what people always end up asking is what made me bother to go ahead and proceed to actually make the bet when the general rule is that a daft idea is by its very nature destined to go no further.

I remember I got exactly the same reaction when I once painted the entire exterior of my house in tangerine orange colour paint and people called me barmy. Then again when a newspaper printed a letter I had wrote condemning the high expectations of today’s youth and suggesting that Santa Clause be killed off in a freak accident . . . I was labelled then by some readers as a complete crackpot and so you can imagine the response from my customers when I had a pub in London some years ago and I woke up one morning and discovered a crop circle shaven into the back of my head . . . so there’s no point wasting more time going into the specifics of every other time I’ve been labelled a fruit-cake and the reasons why, because it would just simply take me too long.

But I do wonder how it's possible that there can be so many people out there apparently devoid of any sense of fun whatsoever and are so quick to label others as complete idiots or completely off their rockers?

Are people for some unknown reason losing their primary sense of fun, imagination and recklessness that they surely must have had and used during their childhood, leaving their lives as bland and as colourless as the magnolia coloured paint throughout their homes?

I recall when you could look into the minds of others and see all the colours of an English summer garden but so very often today all you find is an empty backyard with perhaps if you’re very lucky, a hanging basket. Those memorable moments when just the exchange of a few simple words with a complete stranger during an unexpected fleeting encounter could leave you almost invigorated and in an odd sort of way feeling rather good about yourself, have become somewhat infrequent.

That same magical and colourful imagination that once accompanied me throughout my childhood remains pretty much in-tact and is used probably on a daily basis operating safety from inside a somewhere deep inside my head. It is probably my favourite place to go and spend time, a retreat, often serene and very unique with no boundaries and where nonsense is manufactured and foolish ideas are stored. A place where cows can relax and where colours never fade.

THY SHALT NOT GET CAUGHT COMMITTING ADULTERY

 The chain of wedlock is so heavy it takes two to carry it, sometimes three.

Alexandre Dumas 1803-1870

I was still reeling from the shock of seeing a bearded, middle aged man, wearing a T-shirt that read, 'I eat pussy like fat kids eat cake', when I was informed by a customer that odd noises could be heard coming from inside the ladies toilets.

A couple aged in their late 20's and in a state of undress, were having sex in one of the cubicles. So, after pressing my ear against the door for a short while, I waited until their rhythmic thrusting reached a crescendo then banged hard on the door telling them to stop what they were doing and kindly leave the premises.

Now normally, this kind of conduct isn't too uncommon in some of pubs, particularly at weekends, but what made this particular incident require more than the usual suspension of disbelief, was because while the man made a rather embarrassed and hasty exit from the pub, the woman walked brazenly back into the bar area and calmly sat down . . . next to her husband.

Now at the time, I felt sorry for him because he looked a decent sort of chap, and it occurred to me that the last thing he needed right now was to be humiliated in a pub full of drunken people, so on this occasion, I decided not to pursue the matter any further. However my conscience later nagged me for not telling him what his wife had been up to.

But let's be honest, it can only be a matter of time before her appetite for impromptu sex romps with strangers betrays her, if it hasn’t already, and when it does, I hope the poor bloke finds out discreetly as a result of his own subtle suspicions, rather than seeing dodgy photos of his wife on facebook or reading another man’s crude exposé along with his wife’s mobile number scrawled on the toilet wall at his place of work.

And so whether or not the husband found out exactly what happened that day, I'm afraid I cannot tell you because I don’t know and anyway, it makes no difference to the point I am trying to make, so let me cut straight to the chase.

The fact is, in these modern times, while love still embodies loyalty, commitment and red roses, Lust on the other hand is interested only in satisfying it’s own deviant urges and habitually achieves this rather skillfully by guile.

Infidelity has become the scourge of modern society driven by a tsunami of cultural change drowning us in the sexualization of young girls, inappropriate subliminal allusions and erotic imagery, all peddled so methodically by the mass media - specifically the medium of television, that now accounts for having the biggest influence on our lives in the entire western world, second only to religion.  

In all my years working in the hospitality sector either as a pub landlord and more recently as a doorman, I have encountered extra marital sex on such an astonishing and unbelievable scale that I have sadly come to feel and with good reason too, that the probability of absolute true loyalty and dependability existing in any relationship, surely is about as likely as a giraffe balloon sculpture winning next years Turner Prize.

We’re told that the most common reasons for infidelity given by straying spouses are sexual frustration, curiosity, boredom and revenge, with the third person usually turning out to be either a friend, associate or somebody we know.

Personally, I suspect that for every one person careless enough to be caught cheating behind a partners back, there are probably another five or so interactions carrying on who's participants are simply far too cunning and devious ever to be found out.

Such is the power of lust that precedes an affair and the immeasurable devastation generated by exposure, the absolute genius and brilliance of subterfuge employed in the pursuit of deceiving a loved one, is unparalleled to that of a close up magician who with unfailing sangfroid can deal a royal flush from a shuffled deck of cards.

Our pair bonding ritual used to take place over a period of weeks or even months when genuine courtship was about respect, chivalry and doorstep kisses. But today, a man and a woman who have never before set eyes on each other can strike up a conversation during happy hour and by the time last orders have been called, their brief courtship has already been consummated over a stack of rattling beer crates in the back yard with a post-coital cigarette smoked together out on the front pavement. It gives a totally new meaning to the term speed dating.

Unfortunately however, it's human nature to want more than one sexual partner, especially after so many years of living together. It's a survival trait in all of us allowing us to replace either the hunter-gatherer or the child bearer, lost by a sudden death. It's this default genetic program that helps sustain the ongoing survival of our species.

In fact Stamford University did a study which showed physical chemistry has a shelf life today of just nineteen months showing that society forces 'happily ever after' on us when biologically we're programmed to cope with multiple partners. You can't fight nature.

And if you read Professor Jared Diamond's book, Why is Sex Fun? It explains the link between promiscuity, natural selection and concealed ovulation. He teaches us how evolutionary forces have shaped our sexuality and how concealed ovulation and sexual receptivity in women today, make possible our unique combination of marriage, co-parenting and adulterous temptation. Albeit, we are a long way from perfection but then isn’t that precisely what evolution is all about?

It has been said that the advance of civilization has not so much moulded modern sexual behaviour, as that modern sexual behaviour has moulded the shape of civilization.

Anthropologists suggest that recreational sex is supposed to be the glue that bonds a couple together while they cooperate in raising children, but as we all know even the strongest glue weakens under too much pressure.

When you consider that the 2010 mid year statistics for PaternityLab.co.uk revealed that 1 in 3 DNA tests carried out by them proved negative. In other words - 34.55% of men tested (those who had reason to) were found not to be the biological father. Perhaps then it's only logical that paternity home kits have finally become available to buy over the counter in Boots.

To put things into perspective then, let’s get one thing straight - we are not robots that can be controlled by encoded robotic programming. We are flesh, blood and bone human beings, created by a miracle of nature and graced with feelings and emotions that determine our very own unique and exclusive psyche, ultimately administered and maintained by the awesome power of our brains.

Inside each of our brains there are 100 billion neuron cells that are responsible for sending out signals. And, each one of these 100 billion cells connect independently to another 25 thousand cells, constantly processing information in ever changing relationships. And with all these cells working together, our brains have so far evolved with the capability of making more connections than there are atoms in the entire universe.

Because of this, each and every one of us is unique among all the people who have ever lived on earth. In fact scientists propose that we each have a virtually limitless array of complex emotions that dictate what someone feels at any given time, depending on the thinking experience and memory of the individual. And for this reason alone, no two people can ever be ‘made for each other’ as we like to believe.

Our unique minds are so extraordinarily unpredictable, unexplored and mysteriously deep. To understand exactly how it functions and controls each and every thing we do, would be like claiming to comprehend and understand every single thing there is to know about our entire solar system.

I’m not saying that every person in a relationship has been cheated on. That would be a ridiculous statement to make! I’m merely saying that no matter how strong sexual relations are between a couple in a relationship, if other aspects of mutual interest and compatibility that binds two people together are put in jeopardy then on average, most relationships will not sustain much longer than about two years at the most without one or the other falling out of love through boredom, frustration, curiosity or revenge.

Even the mightiest monumental architectural structure can be bought down by subsidence that starts with a tiny crack.

When a link in the chain of love that joins two people together, becomes weakened by say, too much time apart, a failure in communication or maybe just another volatile domestic argument, then consider the following; when you take into consideration the complexities of the emotional switchboard inside our brain, that part of us that controls our fear, love, pain, hate, anger, elation, greed, envy, shame and lust, to name just a few, and then interact these emotions with other powerful forces such as anger, memory, temptation, curiosity, jealousy and motivation etc. All that’s needed then are some powerful external influences such as alcohol, drugs, companionship, pheromones and sexual imagery. Then just stand back and see what happens.

I reckon that even way back in the Jurassic period, cohabiting cave-couples got bored with each other and on occasions, played away from home. With no recreational activities to partake in other than drawing animal doodles on cave walls and with conversation limited to nothing but endless meaningless grunts, presumably then, sex was the only other way of passing time with your partner and understandably became rather dull and repetitive.

So please forgive me for being presumptuous, in my closing paragraph, but I can't help wondering how many hard working cave-men returned home from hunting unexpectedly early one day, due to say - an injury sustained after wrestling with a mammoth, only to walk in and find their women having sex with the good looking neanderthal who lives in the cave down the road?

We are in a mess....

WE'RE ALL BECOMING TELEVISION ZOMBIES

A proud mum and dad were overjoyed this Christmas as they relaxed one evening while enjoying a few cans of bitter and smoking cheap booze cruise fags, when their eighteen month old son, Kyle, finally spoke his first word!

Faltering slightly as he scampered toward them clumsily with his little arms outstretched, Kyle hesitated then stared upwards into his parents' eyes that were by this time widened with anticipation, and with the TV remote control gripped tightly in his little hand, he goo gooed, then dribbled, before calling out “EASTENDERS!”

This scenario perhaps should not be mocked, because I presume without question that this is a common scene in households all over the country today.

One of a newborn baby’s first experiences in life is to be breastfed while the mother, no doubt, watches daytime television from her maternity bed.

Then, later in the crucial formative years, television becomes the full time babysitter conditioning the child for those prime years when he or she will spend twenty hours a week slumped passively in front of the box. Until finally, in old age, they find themselves residing in a nursing home dumped in front of a television screen for eighty hours a week, while they wait to die.

Ironically, if they manage to attain popularity of some worth, their funeral may even be shown on television in high definition.

In an age where ‘chewing gum for the eyes’ dominates so many peoples’ lives, I stopped impulsively calling in on friends without prior warning many years ago and in particular over the Christmas period, through fear of interrupting and spoiling their meticulously planned television schedules. Would my audacity, I wondered, ever be forgiven for presuming to receive a warm reception in the middle of a sizzling soap ratings winner?

T.S.Elliot warned us about television in the 50’s. Eminent psychologist Dr Eric Sigman wrote a bestselling book about it called Remotely Controlled and Pink Floyd’s Rodger Waters even composed a bestselling album maligning it and aptly naming it, Amused to Death. The album cover depicts a monkey sat in front of a television set - a cynical nod at modern man.

Despite arguments that TV has both good and bad influences on our culture, in my world it represents awfulness tantamount to attending a naturist’s picnic in a pollen field next to a free range bee farm.

Television is no longer a medium for entertainment. It has become an instrument solely for the purpose of advertising, with the spaces between filled by low budget toilet trash targeting the masses.

Commercials desensitise us as suspension of disbelief is spliced by a commercial for constipation replacing Di Nero or Johansson in the midst of an epic that took years to choreograph, cost tens of millions of dollars to film and resulting in some of the worlds most inspiring and artistic cinematography and film score ever produced.

It’s strange how people complain about occasional junk mail falling onto their doormat but allow high pressure advertisements in Dolby surround sound and moving coloured pictures into their living rooms all day long.

I remain puzzled therefore, why entire rooms are arranged around television sets. Kitchen cabinets have them built in, satellite subscriptions are often prioritized over more important financial demands and social events are structured around them.

Rodger Waters, when interviewed about his album said "And I had at one point this rather depressing image of some alien creature seeing the death of this planet and coming down in their spaceships and sniffing around and finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets and trying to work out why it was that our end came before its time, and they come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death."

Consequently, if my councillor friend’s desire for a new Radical Party comes to power, as his confidant, he’s pledged me the position of Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. And once there, I shall move to enforce strict unprecedented sanctions against all television companies including banning all soaps, reality shows and commercial breaks during all programmes. And should my authority be challenged I will petition for a complete period of prohibition.

Please therefore take this letter as a warning to all of you who continue to reduce the brain development of your children and have a TV free happy new year!

Express & Echo

37 Years Ago

                        

The Female Brain

The Day the Earth Stood Still part 2

The majority of women have half a glass too much and let down the barriers a little, then they wake up in the morning riddled with guilt and think they can reclaim their virtue by saying “I can’t remember”.

                                                                   David Niven  in The Pink Panther

Let's suppose that an incredibly superior race of extraterrestrials have been observing our earth since way back in the last millennium.

Now, finally regarding us in such high esteem in terms of our evolvement from tree climbing monkeys to modern day homo sapiens, they decide to visit our planet with the sole purpose of forging an intergalactic alliance that’s considered necessary for the long term continued survival of both of our planets.

And just imagine if they were to bring along with them the wisdom and knowledge that would enable us to solve problems that for years, has baffled our most prominent doctors, scientists and astrophysicists.

They may even be able to show us how it's feasible for the concept of utopia and humankind to co-exist. To live in a world devoid of war, famine, illness and crime as perhaps they have already been doing for hundreds or thousands of years.

And so after many years preparing their finest crew together with a specially elected body of alien beings chosen to represent the ethos of their distant planet, they dispatch a spaceship on a treacherous mission travelling millions of light years through deep space crossing distant galaxies, to visit our earth.

Then finally one day, after perhaps many months traveling in a means of transportation and at a velocity we can’t even begin to understand, they enter our earth’s atmosphere and with trepidation, make a slow and momentous decent before finally touching down onto the surface of our earth.

But then, wouldn’t it be a bloody shame if their spaceship arrived late one night on a bank holiday weekend and instead of landing say, in Parliament Square or on the lawn outside the White House, they landed instead in a typical English town beset with bars, takeaways, racial tension and all the other lowbrow cultural trappings that now mire this once great country.

Hypothetically speaking then, let us assume that they land somewhere like Torquay, Plymouth or even Exeter where I currently work.

Can we even begin to imagine the depravity; degradation and decline that would welcome our visitors when they gather together for the first time on their observation deck and take a look out through the window for the first time?  Just picture it … a dazzling array of pulsating blue Police lights illuminating the hundreds of unruly drink and drug crazed revelers that can pack one stretch of road at any one time.

Groups of police officers, some carrying Tazer electroshock guns, CS gas spray and batons, would be strategically positioned as they usually are at weekends, in an authoritative exhibition of totalitarian might in opposition against the unrelenting violence and lawlessness that spills out from our pubs and clubs and onto our streets each and every weekend.

One officer can be seen pulling back hard on a rope restraining a ferocious German shepherd from leaping up and pulling away, eager to chase and bring someone down using it’s jaws as it was trained to do. While high up, sophisticated and powerful robotic cameras menacingly rotate, roaming up and down the street, searching.

Suddenly outside a bar, a brawl erupts between two mixed gender groups and in typically traditional British fashion, verbal profanities accompanied by a series of goading and aggressive hand gestures are exchanged in a duel tribal display of urban pre-battle foreplay.

A women, barefoot with a tattoo inked across her lower back just above where her thong cuts into her flab, curls her tongue and dispatches a thick green gob planting it on the asphalt just forward of the enemy. With a fag in one hand and a shoe in her other, she yells the familiar battle cry often heard in modern day suburbia, “LET’S FUCKIN ‘AVE IT!”  then dashes forward hammering the pointed heel down hard into a man's head. The ensuing blood that flows from the entry wound signals to all the others for battle to commence.

Within seconds, strangers gather around like children at a playground fight and in all their excitement, takeaway polystyrene containers spill food over the pavement as onlookers hastily cram as much food as they can into their already gorged mouths.

Meanwhile, those others who are so completely drunk that they can't even coordinate the workings of their own legs, somehow manage to advance forward in unhurried stages dragging one foot behind them at a time. And with their vacant eyes, gaping mouths and heads listing over to one side, they resemble film extras from a cult zombie flick.

Just a little further down the road, a young woman squats in a shop doorway as steaming urine cuts a jagged path across the sloped pavement and into the gutter as her friend stands next to her clinging onto a wheelie bin with her head lowered and waiting in anticipation for the inevitable stomach convulsions that always precede the thick surge of rancid vomit that dispenses so vehemently making that well defined splosh sound that we’re all familiar with when somebody chunders.

By this time . . . the UFO's alien mission commander will no doubt be scratching his huge head and looking rather bewildered wondering just where the hell they have landed. No doubt he’ll be asking himself whether his navigation officer made a slight booboo when coordinating their flight path.

But continuing with his assignment, I wonder how quickly his enthusiasm would diminish when, with his entire crew observing through the window with bated breath and with live coverage being transmitted back to his own planet, he climbs slowly out through the departure hatch and as he cautiously descends the exit ramp, he inadvertently steps on a portion of cheesy chips tossed aside only moments earlier by a passing drunk. The ensuing skid snatches his legs away quickly initiating an awkward looking backward flip and he frantically reaches out with both hands to grab hold of anything he can in a desperate, futile attempt to save himself from falling. But as he disappears over the edge, a scream, stifled noticeably by his thick space-suit, can be heard trailing behind as he plummets to the ground landing heavily with an unforgiving thud and startling a young man squatting down just a few feet away having a dump behind the ship’s landing gear.

Nearby, un-phased by all this commotion, seagulls squabble viciously over a kebab strewn over the road while the man who once owned it sleeps soundly across the car bonnet where he fell.

If then after seeing all of this, the alien ship’s commander then feels compelled to run back into the spacecraft screaming, "Abort mission” and blasting-off back into deep space, then in all honesty, could we really blame him? This being the case, to lose the opportunity of benefiting from the knowledge and experience of a race far more advanced and superior than ours, would be nothing short of catastrophic.

Our only slight hope for salvation would be if by some slim chance, just one of their crew would notice amid this shameful exhibition of hedonism and social decadence, a holidaying family of four who after an enjoyable evening out at the theatre now find themselves, caught up in this hellish situation as they make their way back to their hotel.

With the parents having no option but to walk with their two young children through this ominous gathering of human garbage, the children’s faces who only moments earlier looked so joyful now look desperately frightened as mummy and daddy lovingly and reassuringly lift and carry them, pulling them in tightly.  

Having noticed the children’s fear and witnessing the true extent of the parents alarm and apprehension, perhaps only then would the aliens, who no doubt have children of their own would then realize that not all people on earth are repugnant as it first appears and they then mercifully choose to stay on this planet and help us rather than flee wrongfully mistaking us to be a species unworthy of salvation.

Perhaps if within their already successfully proven agenda of race development and survival this includes firstly a cull, a procedure we already use successfully when our cows go mad, followed then by implementing a long term reproductive program based on the contentious philosophy of eugenics, then personally, speaking as a doorman, I have no problem with this whatsoever.

Renowned physicist and award winning science writer John Gribbon, put the human race into perspective using the following analogy. If you can imagine shrinking the entire 4.5 billion year history of the earth, into a single 24 hour day period, then dinosaurs wouldn’t show up until 11 o’clock at night and they would be wiped out twenty minutes before midnight and get this! - humans wouldn’t appear until just two seconds before midnight and all of recorded history . . . right back to the pyramids, would take place in the last tenth of a second.

So then, taking this into consideration, as a species still so young in terms of evolutionary advancement, when you consider the enormity and seriousness of the problems and the mess we have created for ourselves as a consequence of our hedonistic, deviant lifestyles, I guess it’s safe to say we have pretty well fudged things up already. Perhaps God’s biggest gaffe was wiring up the circuitry in our brains too swiftly because as our brains evidently developed and became larger and as we became more inquisitive, it didn’t take too long before we climbed down from the trees, learned to walk upright and no doubt had our first cave party.

A graffiti artist is reputed to have once sprayed on a wall, ‘God is alive – but working on a less ambitious project’ and who knows, perhaps this is the case. But I suspect if the truth were known, God is gnashing his teeth for taking that seventh day off to play golf instead of staying put and completing the job efficiently.

ADDITIONAL NOTE:

A study on the popular Caribbean island of St Kitts in which alcohol was given to monkeys revealed startling similarities between the ways in which humans and small primate react to alcohol.

The study involving one thousand green Vervet monkeys showed that the vast majority drank moderately by stealing alcoholic beverages from the thousands of holidaymakers who visit the beach bars every day. Also, the monkeys preferred to have their alcohol diluted with fruit juice and enjoy drinkng only in the company of other monkeys who are also drinking (and never before lunch). Around 15% drank heavily and frequently, preferring their booze as strong as possible, while roughly the same percentage either sustained or hardly drank at all. And about 5 % turned out to be binge drinkers, knocking it back as fast as possible, getting into fights and then passing out.

Kim Jong-un

MISS XXXL AND HER £200 SHOES

Just recently, I had reason to stop and ask a young woman for proof of her age before I would allow her into the venue where I work as a doorman at weekends.

At the time, storm clouds had been lashing it down for quite some time and doing a blinding job too, flushing away the urine and chunder that trickled out from shop doorways while nearby, un-suitably dressed night revellers skirmished for cover like troops, tactically advancing in a hostile, built up area.

The young woman, who at first appeared somewhat thickset as she approached from a distance but was in fact enormously obese as she stood before me, looked utterly miserable as the unremitting rain pummelled down intensely upon her generous exterior. Trembling with cold, her drenched hair had separated into tufts that stuck tight against her forehead then continued down slightly obscuring her eyes and over her face where by this time, black eyeliner had inked thick wavering trails down and over each of her cheeks joining together under her chin forming a large globule, where it hung poised and ready to drip onto her white tee-shirt.

She was visibly desperate to be allowed in and I was thankful for her lack of complaint as it took me perhaps longer than usual in the deficient light to read the small print on her driving licence. In fact it was only when I stopped to take a sip of my coffee when her patience expired and she let rip. ‘Fuckin ‘ell mate!’, she screamed at me, ‘I’m nineteen! . . . let me in will ya? I’m freezing an gettin' fuckin soaked out ‘ere and I paid two hundred quid for these fuckin' shoes and now they’re getting fuckin ruined! . . . fuckin let us in will ya!!!’

As it transpired, the young lady was indeed nearly twenty years old and that's when it occurred to me how foolish I must have been, to have even doubted for one moment that she could possibly had been any younger?

Surely, it would require at least eighteen years existing on pizzas, burgers and cake shop lock-ins to actually balloon to such an immense size in the first place. There was just no way she could have been so fat and still been under eighteen years old.

I wondered however why she wore so little clothes. With no coat for protection, she’d come out wearing just a white tee-shirt and a pair of dark leggings not quite concealing a thong strap, while her stomach resembled a tsunami of doughy flesh rolling out and then sort of flopping down and folding back in under it's own dense mass of solidified industrial chip fat. Her entire midriff was a repugnant exhibition of human grossness of the worst kind and I decided to name her, 'Miss XXXL'.

I nodded her in and as she did, she nudged me, engaging me to turn and glance just one more time at her entire sodden wretchedness as she floundered through the inner door and into the bar area where she paused momentarily, presumably to look for her friends. Then, just as I was turning away, something prompted me to stop and look back and when I did, I found myself transfixed, open mouthed and in unmitigated awe, at the steam that was rising upwards from off her back. Just like it does on horses.

By now, this brief encounter had stirred up an extraordinary and curious fascination within me and I became mesmerised by her presence, like a marine biologist might feel seeing a Humpback Whale for the first time.

She was undoubtedly I felt, a worthy topic for debate. Perfect subject matter either for an after dinner discussion or just some lively banter with mates down the boozer over a couple of light ales. Nonetheless, at that moment in time, the deeper I probed, the more of an enigma Miss XXXL became. And I needed closure.

I’ve always been amazed how the laws of physics make it achievable for the applied body mass and weight of an abnormally fat woman wearing high shoes with pencil thin heels, to be supported and balanced during the actual mechanics of walking. Surely in the case of Miss XXXL, the heels should have snapped off when she first tried them on in the shop?

So when I researched deeper into this phenomenon I was surprised to find that physicists had already beaten me to it. By using computations and theoretical physics, they determined that a normal 110lb woman wearing stiletto high heels exerts more pressure on the ground than a 6000lb elephant. This being so, what would they determine the psi of concentrated pressure to be that emitted from the tiny surface areas of Miss XXXL’s shoe heels? And furthermore, imagine the outcome had she for some reason turned hostile knocking me to the ground and then jumping on me.

Based on the extraordinary physics involved, the next time I see a fat woman wearing high heels I'm going to feel almost obliged to walk up to her and shake her hand, slap her on the back and say 'Bloody well done, Miss!'

But without getting too carried away into the realms of scientific investigation, I suppose the first thing that immediately struck me about her, was how a woman like this could possibly feel justified wearing what she did in a public domain? And why would she choose to spend two hundred pounds on a pair of shoes? Isn’t this just completely and utterly pointless . . . like furnishing an outside yard toilet with flock wallpaper and deep pile carpet?

Another interesting thing I found out was that the average increase in the protrusion of a woman’s buttocks is 25% when she wears high heels. So why would any woman with a fat arse wish to embellish and draw attention to an already existing blight?

I don't mean to sound spiteful and malicious in sharing this

anecdote with you and I apologize if I come across in this tone. I am merely expressing my honest opinions by using words in the same cavalier manner as indeed Miss XXXL chose to dress that very evening.

And anyway, It is often considered that a hard hitting approach can often help raise awareness more speedily, in this case, of the cultural dissimilarities that almost paradoxically co-exist on the same social platform.

By observing and taking note of how other people choose to dress and behave, we can perhaps benefit ourselves by developing a far deeper awareness and understanding of how - the image a person has of themselves - more often than not is nothing remotely like the image other people see. Much the same as how we think we sound when we talk and then we hear ourselves on a recording and think, 'Oh my God . . . Do I really sound like that?'

Possibly the only real enjoyment I get in my capacity as a doorman is in observing the individual and tribal social behaviour of night revellers, particularly on the basis that - like it or not, we are all primarily judged by others according to how we present ourselves.    

Presumably then it was this ideology that inspired the quotation; ‘If you dress poorly people will notice the clothes, but if you dress sharp, people will notice the person inside’.

Maybe if Miss XXXL had been familiar with this saying, she could have saved herself two hundred quid and used the money to buy a decent sized overcoat to cover herself up and still had enough money left for a large kebab or two . . . or three . . .